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Library of The Theological Seminary 


PRINCETON - NEW JERSEY 


D7 KE 


PRESENTED BY 
Harry R. DeYoung 















HARRY R. DE YOUNG / 





THE: PORTRAITS OF 
JESUS CHRIST 
IN THE 
NEW TESTAMENT 


\ 


‘eine Ce 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
WEW YORK + BOSTON + CHICAGO + DALLAS 
ATLANTA * SAN FRANCISCO 


MACMILLAN & CO., Limitep 
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Aiginte ee Y TRA Tel Si) Oils 
Peo CR Sy HIN 
ine NEW TE STANENT 





= 
Breeton RY SVOANE) COREIN 


MINISTER IN THE MADISON AVENUE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, -—- nc BOF eS 


AND PROFESSOR IN THE UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, say nn 
NEW YORK CITY saw 
bog 
hil 
JUL O 


Christus ist nicht der Lehrer wie man zu sagen pflegt; Christus 
nicht der Stifter; Er ist der Inhalt des Christentums.—Schelling 


anon 


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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 
1926 





Ti 









Copyright, 1926, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 





Set up and Electrotyped, 
Published March, 1926. ae 





fil ar 
fe Hh, 
or 
i: mn By Ly ‘ 


To 
WILLIAM RAYMOND JELLIFFE 
and 
GEORGE STEWART 


My Colleagues in the pastorate 
of the 
Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church 





PREFACE 


In the theological discussions of the day, one frequently 
hears the expression—‘‘the Christ of the New Testament.’’ 
‘Those who use the phrase apparently mean that there is 
a conception of Him which includes every item in every 
book. But no such combination exists in the New Testa- 
ment itself. It presents us with a number of portraits, 
differing in many details, and makes no attempt to har- 
monize them. Behind them all is the historic Jesus with 
the religious impression which He produced on those who 
knew Him, and His living Spirit in the lives of those who 
received this impression and interpreted it in their writ- 
ings. But they depict Him against differing backgrounds 
and from differing viewpoints. 

In all of these portraits He is the central and final Figure 
in God’s Self-revelation—the Lord and Saviour of men. 
This He has always been, and is, in the experience and 
life of the Church. 

But in current discussions a particular interpretation of 
the manner of His birth, or of the meaning of His cross, 
or of the mode of His resurrection, is often called ‘‘essen- 
tial,’ or ‘‘a fundamental of New Testament Christianity. s 
It is well to notice that New Testament writers give vari- 
ous explanations of our Lord’s origin, and death, and of 
His life thereafter. While it would be fallacious to argue 
that a writer is ignorant of an event, or does not accept an 
interpretation, which he fails to mention, still each was 
trying to present a whole Christ to his readers. He was 
not aware that he was contributing to a collection of writ- 
ings, so that his omissions would be filled in by others. 
We are, therefore, not justified in terming items, which 


5 


6 PREFACE 


several of them think unnecessary to include, ‘‘fundamen- , 
tals of New Testament Christianity.’’ What is essential 
is found in them all. 

The following chapters were preached as sermons, not 
to build up a systematic doctrine of Christ’s Person, but 
to present Him in each of the eight portraits, and to bring 
out in each the elements most appealing to present thought 
and most satisfying to our spiritual need. “They make no 
pretence at original scholarship; they are an attempt to 
bring the learning of scholars to plain folk. 

In his preface to a collection of Best Sermons of 1925, 
Dr. J. Fort Newton remarks that expository preaching is 
‘“‘well-nigh impossible in America.” But a congregation, 
widely representative of the mixed population of New 
York City, bore with the sermons that follow, which are 
nothing but expositions of New Testament delineations 
of Christ. Surely the Bible is the most fascinating of 
books, and the most enriching sermons are those which 
expound its thought and pass on its wealth of life with 
God. Expository preaching demands mental effort on the 
part of listeners; but ‘‘painless preaching’ cannot long 
hold the thoughtful, nor produce intelligent and informed 
followers of Christ. “Too much has been said about pro- 
phetic ministers. No prophet undertook to preach twice 
every seventh day. A minister of the Gospel may prophesy 
on occasion; but his steady duty is to teach “every man 
in all wisdom’’ that he may “‘present every man mature 
in Christ.”’ 


CHAPTER 


I, 
II. 
Ti: 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 
THE PORTRAIT IN THE EARLIEST PREACHING... 9 
THE? PORTRAIT IN THE VERTTERS OR" PAUL. ie. 19 


THE PORTRAIT IN THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO 
AM ISU oe ene EPR ue as Leeder aE. NL ened Ne 30 


THE PORTRAIT IN THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO 
BA AGT FAR Wide ren x i atniias ie aL Seana Pd ve on og Pee Me 42 


THE PORTRAIT IN THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO 
US 2 Eg GE at TE eR CARES VON TED Doe Oot RADY LSD 53 


THE PORTRAIT IN THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS. 63 
THE PORTRAIT IN THE REVELATION OF JOHN... 74 


THE PORTRAIT IN THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO 
JOHN Co ORY teal Dal eg oe © © O20. 6: O' 6 © 05.6.0, 6. 0;,0,6260: 6 6.6, 6) 6, 297 2 85 





THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS CHRIST 
IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 


CHAM TERR! 


Mies ePORTRATUSING THE EARLIEST 
PREACHING 


The early chapters of the Book of Acts contain the 
account of the first preaching about Jesus done by His 
followers immediately after the close of His own earthly 
career. [he book was not itself written until many years 
later, but scholars think that behind the Greek of its 
early narratives they can detect Aramaic documents, and 
these may well be recollections of the members of the 
Christian community at Jerusalem, later used by the his- 
torian in compiling his account. And in any case the 
thought in these chapters appears untouched by later 
developments, and so seems to reflect accurately what the 
first witnesses said of their Master. 

How, then, did they picture Him? Against what 
background did they place His portrait? In what pose 
did they draw His figure? 

At Pentecost we hear Peter saying: ‘‘This Jesus did 
God raise up, whereof we all are witnesses. Being there- 
fore by the right hand of God exalted, and having received 
of the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He hath 
poured forth this, which ye see and hear.’’ Again in 
another speech, we hear Peter speaking of “‘Jesus whom 
the heaven must receive until the times of restoration of 
all things.’” And when Stephen is being stoned to death, 
it is significant of the portrait of Christ which was 
habitually in his mind, that he sees “‘the heavens opened, 


9 


10 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God.” 
The Jesus whom they portray is the risen and exalted © 
Christ, at God’s right hand in the heavens. 

They supply His portrait with two backgrounds. The 
first is the background of a national history. He is the 
long-promised Messiah, “‘the Christ who hath been 
appointed for you.’ They dwell upon the expectation 
of believers in Israel’s past: ‘‘Moses indeed said, A 
prophet shall the Lord God raise up unto you from among 
your brethren. Unto you first God, having raised up His 
Servant, sent Him to bless you.”’ ‘They took colors out 
of that background in which to paint His figure. They 
applied to Him such titles as Prophet, the Servant of the 
Lord, the Anointed. ‘They set Him forth with the long 
vista of wistful ages behind Him. 

And the second background with which they supplied 
His portrait was the heavens into which He had now 
been received. ‘They did not think of Him, as we might 
have expected, in the associations of Galilee and of the 
Upper Room at Jerusalem; they thought of Him as set in 
majesty on high. ‘They did not look back and paint 
His figure in the light of their memories. They looked 
up and pictured Him in the glory of their present faith 
and future hope. ‘The familiar human scenes, in which 
they had been His comrades, seem almost completely lost 
sight of. They have been for the moment obliterated by 
the radiant glory which streams from His conquest of 
death and His entrance into the realms of light. They 
portray him in the loftiest place in the universe, side by 
side with the Most High God. 

They have not altogether forgotten His earthly 
career. [hey speak of him as “‘Jesus of Nazareth,’ as 
“a Man approved by God,” a prophet raised up ‘‘from 
among His brethren,” “‘the Pioneer of life’’-—a very sug- 
gestive title recalling a frontiersman who advances the 
boundaries of habitable territory beyond any point 


IN THE EARLIEST PREACHING 11 


hitherto reached and opens up new tracts of existence, 
new regions of spiritual life, for his followers. They 
recall that He “‘went about doing good,’’ healing and 
performing other mighty works. They dwell particu- 
larly upon His cruelly unmerited death: ‘Him ye by the 
hands of lawless men did crucify and slay.’’ That had 
been an experience of tragic disappointment and of horror 
for them; but now in the light of His enthronement and 
against the background of history they had begun to 
explain it to themselves and to find it part of God’s plan. 
They mused over the Fifty-third Chapter of Isaiah, 
written originally of Israel, the Servant Nation, and they 
saw in it a striking anticipation of the sufferings and death 
of their Master. Jesus was the true Servant of the Lord. 
While His death was due to the lawless hands of men, 
it was no accident upsetting the divine purpose. ‘Him 
being delivered up by the determinate counsel and fore- 
knowledge of God.’’ Philip explains the Fifty-third 
Chapter of Isaiah to the Ethiopian eunuch as a picture of 
the redemptive suffering of Jesus. “That background of 
history made the cross stand forth in glorious light: 
“The things which God foreshadowed by the mouth of 
all the prophets, that His Christ should suffer, He thus 
fulfilled.”’ 

But all that He underwent in His earthly experience 
was merely preliminary to His present exalted life. Peter 
is voicing the faith of his fellow-believers when he said: 
“Let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God 
hath made Him Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom ye 
crucified.”” ““The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, 
whom ye slew, hanging Him on a tree. Him did God 
exalt with His right hand to be a Prince and a Saviour.”’ 
And they ascribe to Him one more august rdle reserved 
for the future: “This is He which is ordained of God 
to be the Judge of the living and the dead.” 

It is a regal portrait, a Figure set amid the splendor of 


12 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


the heavens and with the sweep of the ages stretching off | 
in the distance and finding their culmination in His reign. 
To be sure we are profoundly thankful that it is not the 
only portrait that we have of Jesus. We should miss 
incalculably much. ‘These earliest descriptions do not 
quote a single saying of His. “They do not draw for us 
any scene in His ministry. His human figure is so 
swathed in the robes of His kingly glory that we gain 
scarcely any impression of His character. But He stands 
before us in the triumphant majesty in which He was 
pictured by the faith of those who had passed through 
the disaster of Calvary and knew the victory of His 
resurrection and the experience of His empowering gift of 
the Spirit. 

If we scan this portrait to inquire how they accounted 
for Jesus, we notice that there is no allusion to His pre- 
existence in heaven or to His coming to earth. They 
think of Him as “‘raised up from among His brethren.” 
Nor do they mention anything unusual in connection with 
His birth. ‘They are entirely silent upon His origin: if 
they knew anything surprising about it, they did not deem 
it essential to tell it. [hey portray Him as ‘‘a Man 
approved of God,” “‘anointed with the Holy Spirit and 
with power.” ‘They explain His marvellous works by 
saying simply, “‘God was with Him.” It may be going 
too far to say that they did not consider Him the Messiah 
while He was on earth; but their language implies that 
it was by His resurrection and exaltation that He was 
given His unique office: ‘God made Him both Lord and 
Christ’; ‘‘Him did God exalt with His right hand to be 
a Prince and a Saviour, for to give repentance to Israel and 
remission of sins.”’ 

From these expressions we cannot deduce how they 
thought of Jesus’ relation to God. But what a tribute to 
the impression which He made upon these intimate asso- 
ciates that they should feel no incongruity in placing their 


INGE BARLIEST (PREACHING 13 


Friend at God’s right hand! As Jews they had been 
brought up in the strictest monotheism. The chief article 
of their creed ran: ‘‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God 
is one Lord.”’ But the only appropriate spot in the 
universe which they could find for the Comrade with 
whom they had broken bread and walked along dusty 
roads was on the same throne with the God of all. By 
the same religious instinct they were worshippers of one 
God and of Jesus. 

It is sometimes thought that Jesus was revered by His 
first followers as a supreme Teacher, and that only by 
subsequent generations who had never known Him in 
the flesh was He adored as Divine. But here is the earliest 
portrait which we possess of Him, earlier than that in 
any of the gospels. “he Teacher is entirely lost sight of; 
one would not know that He had taught at all. It is 
the Divine Saviour and Lord who commands their loyalty. 
Our age stresses the humanity of Jesus and finds difficulty 
in believing Him to be Divine. The First Century never 
seems to have had any difficulty with His Divinity. The 
earliest heresies were denials of His manhood. ‘The Jesus 
who gained the allegiance of hundreds in Jerusalem and 
in the towns of Palestine and in Gentile Antioch was not 
pictured to them as the wisest and best of men. He was 
the Anointed of God, the Messiah who had triumphed 
over death and was exalted to the heavens. 

If we ask how they conceived His relation with His 
followers, it would seem that they felt that He was sepa- 
rated from them. ‘The heaven had “‘received’’ Him, and 
He was hid from them for a while. It was natural to 
men who had known His physical presence to feel them- 
selves parted from Him when they could no longer see and 
hear Him. But He remained a dominant influence in 
those who had been His companions. Men “took knowl- 
edge’’ of Peter and John ‘“‘that they had been with Jesus.” 
And it is worth noting that the characteristic in them 


14 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


which recalled their association with Jesus was their | 
“boldness’—a quality we rarely consider distinctive of 
Jesus. They wrought mighty works ‘in His name’’— 
and according to the ideas of that day when a god was 
summoned by name, he was thought of as responding 
and coming to assist’ His devotees. Using the name of 
Jesus would give them a sense of His continuing fellow- 
ship and activity through them. Supremely they thought 
of Him as sending down His Spirit, the Spirit of God, 
upon them. This had been the source of His own power; 
now, exalted, He pours forth the same gift on them. He 
was absent in the heavens until a hoped-for time—‘The 
great Restoration,” they called it. But meanwhile He 
was not out of touch with them. Through His potent 
name they wrought works akin to His, and He was giving 
them His Spirit which produced their ecstatic enthusiasm, 
uttering itself in tongues, and their fellowship of brotherly 
love. 

What shall we say of this portrait of Jesus? Were 
we to take it too literally, it would be impossible for us, 
for we do not localize heaven and think of God as a 
human Figure on a throne. Nor should we be prepared 
to admit that Jesus was partially absent, withdrawn from 
us in the skies. But faith must always think in pictures, 
and we must recognize what this portrait did for these 
early Christians. It made their faith a world-religion. 
If His disciples had looked back upon their Master and 
recalled Him only in the setting of His early career in 
Palestine, He would have remained a Jewish Figure inex- 
tricably bound up with His own people. When they 
thought of Him as enthroned with God, it became possible 
for them to believe that He was for every nation. He 
was lifted out of the confining limitations of a single race 
and locality; He became accessible to mankind. Peter 
speaking of Jesus to Cornelius, interjects, “‘He is Lord 


TN ribo PARTIES? PREACHING 15 


of all.”’ This is the picture of Jesus which began the 
missionary career of the Church. 
What, then, is its permanent value to Christians? 


In the first place it sets forth Jesus asa Contemporary, 


not as a memory. ‘There are many Christians still for 


(s 


whom Jesus is a Figure of the long ago. They associate | 


Him only with the customs and thought and life of a 


bygone age; they do not connect Him with the happen- | 
ings of today, nor fit Him into the life of our time. This | 
robs Him of worth as an ideal and guide for the present. ~ 


They say with Palgrave 


Dim tracts of time divide 
Those golden days from me; 

Thy voice comes strange o’er years of change; 
How can I follow Thee? 


Comes faint and far Thy voice 
From vales of Galilee; 

Thy vision fades in ancient shades; 
How should we follow Thee? 


Even to most earnest and thoughtful Christians the con- 
viction that Christ is alive comes as a startling discovery. 
A generation ago, one of the most eminent British 
preachers, Dr. Dale of Birmingham, tells how this truth 
broke on him. 


He was writing an Easter sermon, and when half- 
way through, the thought of the risen Lord broke 
in upon him as it had never done before. ‘‘Christ 
is alive,’ I said to myself; “‘alive!’’ and then I 
paused ;—“‘alive!’’ and then I paused again; “‘alive! 
Can that really be true? Living as really as I myself 
am?’’ I got up and walked about repeating ‘‘Christ 
is living! Christ is living!’’ At first it seemed strange 
and hardly true, but at last it came upon me as a 
burst of sudden glory; yes, Christ is living. It was 
to me a new discovery. I thought that all along I 


16 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


had believed it; but not until that moment did I 

feel sure about it. 
However we conceive our world—and the symbolism of 
the New ‘Testament faith is still probably as vivid a pic- 
ture as we can place before the eyes of our hearts—we 
must link a living and_ contemporary Jesus with the cir- 
cumstances of our times and think of Him as moving in 
it, its rightful although largely unacknowledged Lord. 
We must set Him, not back in First Century Palestine, 
but here amid and over Twentieth Century America and 
our present world. 

Again, placing Jesus at the right hand of God—the 
hand with which He works—helped them, and may help 
us, to Christianize our thought of God. We cannot think 
of God as doing anything into which Jesus does not fully 
enter. We can never attribute to Him aught that is 
unchristlike. We often ascribe to God acts which we 
should never dream of ascribing to Jesus. The result is 
that God is represented as scarcely a Christian. A devas- 
tating storm or a destructive earthquake is imputed to His 
providence; a war or an epidemic is called His visitation. 
Obviously if this be His world, He is chargeable with at 
least the possibility of these grim occurrences; but that He 
deliberately arranges and causes them is another matter. 
We live in an as-yet-unfinished world. There is always 
some risk in walking about a building still in process of 
erection. Ladders or temporary steps are not as safe as 
a stairway, nor are planks set down upon beams to be 
compared with a well laid floor. We may say that it is 
the Architect’s fault that we are exposed to such hazards; 
but suppose we are His fellow-workmen, how can He use 
us to build with Him and not subject us to the dangers of 
the uncompleted structure? If we set Jesus at His right 
hand we must not place to God’s account any act with 
which Jesus is not in heartiest sympathy. Whatever 
happenings may befall us in this period of construction— 


IN THE EARLIEST PREACHING W7, 


and the city of God is not yet here—and whatever tragic 
consequences may be due to the ignorance or selfishness of 
sinful men, we will not debase our thought of God. We 
shall keep Him as lofty in motive and as loving in heart as 
Jesus; we cannot conceive Him higher or better. When 
we think of Jesus as at God’s right hand, we do not so 
much exalt Jesus as exalt our thought of God. With His 
right hand God is ever busied in that, and that only, 
which Jesus heartily shares with Him. 

Again, it serves to render the remotest spot in the 
universe homelike. The unseen so easily becomes the 
uncanny. But with Jesus in the mysterious heavens, and 
with Jesus sharing every act of the living God, there is no 
strange and foreign region in the visible or the invisible. 
Perhaps we may make vivid to ourselves the feelings of 
these early believers by recalling some lines which Tenny- 
son wrote of his dead friend, Hallam. The outlook of 
these early Christians cannot have been altogether dis- 
similar. “The poet, addressing his former comrade, 
writes: 


Strange friend, past, present, and to be; 
Loved deeplier, darklier understood; 
Behold, I dream a dream of good, 

And mingle all the world with thee. 


Thy voice is on the rolling air; 
I hear thee where the waters run; 
Thou standest in the rising sun, 
And in the setting thou art fair. 


What art thou, then? I cannot guess; 
But tho’ I seem in star and flower 
To feel thee some diffusive power, 

I do not therefore love thee less. 


The universe to its utmost bound becomes a Christian’s 
home when he pictures Jesus as everywhere sharing its 
control. We think of God somewhat differently from 
these First Century believers. We do not locate Him in 


18 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


a heaven and regard Him as sundered from us. God is 
to us the Life, the Order, the Beauty, of the world, the 
controlling and resident Spirit behind and in all things. 
And if we associate Jesus with Him, there is no spot in 
creation from which Jesus is debarred, and no situation 
in which we cannot place ourselves under His control. 
As these believers used the name of Jesus and felt confident 
that He wrought with them in power, so we apply the 
Spirit of Jesus to every problem or ordeal, and are sure 
that the force of the universe is in alliance with us. 

Finally, this portrait of the enthroned Jesus gave them 
their program for the Church. One might fancy that to 
picture Jesus as a Sovereign would ease His followers from 
effort. God had placed the crown on His forehead; they 
need not trouble themselves. But they saw this portrait 
of their Lord as God’s plan which they must bring to pass. 

In the ceiling of one of the old baptisteries in Ravenna 
there is a mosaic of an empty throne. I do not know for 
what that symbol originally stood; but to me it suggested 
the place of universal control God meant for Christ where 
Christians must seat Him—Lord of their lives and Lord 
of the whole world. 


COAP TER II 
Temeom ur AL INO HE LEP PERS OP PAUL 


As momentous as Jesus’ entry into any town or city— 
Nazareth or Capernaum or Jerusalem—was His entry into 
the life of Saul of Tarsus; and as striking as any series 
of events in His ministry on earth is His work in the soul 
of Saul. For out of that experience of Christ within him 
came the letters which form so much of our New Testa- 
ment, and furnish us with a portrait of Jesus which has 
carried Him into countless Christian hearts, 

Paul took over the portrait of the Master which had 
been drawn by the earlier disciples. He, too, saw Jesus 
against the background of a long history. “‘How many 
soever be the promises of God, in Him is the yea.”’ This 
brilliant and earnest young Pharisee, educated in Gamaliel’s 
classroom, familiar with the hope of Israel, became con- 
vinced that Jesus was the promised Messiah, and naturally 
painted Him in the colors of the Jewish anticipation. He 
is ‘Christ,’ “‘the Son of God.’’ But Jesus had upset 
expectations in fulfilling them, and the Christ Paul knew 
in Jesus was vastly better than the Christ he had looked 
for. 

And like the earlier preachers, Paul portrays Jesus 
against a background of heavenly splendor. He is the 
living and exalted Lord. ‘‘God raised Him from the 
dead, and made Him to sit at His right hand in the 
heavenly places far above all rule, and power, and 
dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this 
age, but also in that which is to come, and He put all 


19 


20 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


things in subjection under His feet.’’ If Paul mentions 
an event in the past career of Jesus, like the cross, he is 
quick to turn his readers’ minds from it to His present 
glory. ‘“‘It is Christ Jesus that died, yea rather, that was 
raised from the dead, who ts at the right hand of God.” 
Paul goes farther than the earlier preachers. They had 
said nothing of Christ’s origin; but Paul pictures Him not 
merely as entering the heavens after His resurrection. He 
comes from heaven where He existed “in the form of 
God.” In language which he borrowed from Jewish 
thinkers Paul pictures Him as “‘the Firstborn of all crea- 
tion,’ and the principle by which the entire universe holds 
together: ‘In Him all things consist.’’ Jesus is not 
only the Messiah to whom Israel looked wistfully forward 


during centuries; all_through their history He was an 
unsuspected spiritual p presence with them. In the wilder- 


ness ‘‘they drank of a spiritual rock that followed them; 
and the rock was Christ.”’ 


But the distinctive background with which Paul sup- 


plies the portrait of Jesus is his own heart_and the hearts 


of believing men and women: ‘‘Christ liveth in me,’ 


“Christ in you,” ‘‘that Christ may dwell in your hearts 
by faith.” This is not a portrait which others had drawn 
for him. On that memorable day when a light had 
blinded his eyes as he traveled by the Damascus Road, God 
had shone in his heart. You remember how he himself 
describes what happened: ‘‘It was the good pleasure of 
God to reveal His Son in me.’’ Jesus was to him “a life- 
giving Spirit,’’ who made him a new man, fearlessly con- 
fident in God and with a passion to make the whole world 
Christ’s. 

This Jesus who had flashed upon Paul’s soul was a 
heavenly Being—‘‘the Lord of glory.’’ As we read 
Paul’s letters we learn very little about Jesus’ earthly life. 
One or two of His sayings are quoted: Christ’s teaching 
about divorce, for example. And the saying, not found 





ACCORDING TO PAUL 21 


in any of the four Gospels, ‘‘It is more blessed to give 
than to receive,’’ we owe to a speech of Paul’s. He gives 
in detail the account of the Lord’s Supper, of which he 
had been told by those who were present in the Upper 
Room. But scarcely anything else in the life of Jesus is 


referred to. Paul says explicitly that he was not inter- 
ested in knowing Christ ‘‘after the flesh.’’ The two 


events on which Paul dwells are the death on the cross 
and especially the resurrection. It had been Jesus’ execu- 
tion as a criminal which had made the new faith odious 
to this devout Jew. It had seemed nothing less than 
blasphemous to him that men in Jerusalem spoke of the 
Nazarene, who had been hanged up by the Romans on a 
cross outside the city, as God’s anointed King. It had 
been so horrible to him that he had volunteered to root 
out this accursed sect, and had been head and front of the 
persecution. As for the stories of Jesus’ resurrection, 
they had been idle tales invented by deceivers. Jesus had 
been buried, and Paul was resolved to bury all who 
believed in Him. Then suddenly the risen and exalted 
Jesus had laid hold on him. Paul’s mind was filled with 
these facts that Jesus had died and been buried and had 
been raised from the dead. ‘They so engrossed his interest 
that he could speak of little else. They were of such 
overwhelming importance that nothing else seemed to 
matter. 
Paul admits us to his own mind when he puts the order 
of these events first the resurrection, then the death of 
Christ: “that I may know Him, and the power of His 
resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings.’’ It 
was only because Jesus had risen that Paul could think of 
His sufferings as worth knowing. At one time the cross 
has been to him, as to any right-minded Jew, ‘‘a 
stumbling-block.’’ Now that Jesus lived in power for 
him, it became the chief means by which the world was 


ZL THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


saved. ‘Christ crucified, the power of God, and the wis- 
dom of God.” 

While, then, we find few details of Jesus’ earthly career 
in the portrait given us by Paul, and mainly these crown- 
ing events, the resurrection and the cross, the character of 
Jesus stands out plainly in his picture. He tells us little 
of what Jesus said or did, but he tells us much of what 
Jesus was. He appeals to the Corinthians “‘by the gentle- 
ness and reasonableness of Christ.’’ He writes the Philip- 
pians that he feels towards them with the affectionate heart 
of Christ. He urges strong Christians to bear the loads 
of the weak, because ‘“‘Christ pleased not Himself.’’ He 
bids men give generously because for our sakes Christ 
‘became poor.’”’ We may be sure that Paul never forgot 
what he learned from Peter and James on that first visit 
when, a distrusted convert, he had gone up to Jerusalem, 
nor what he learned from others who had companied with 
Jesus. He asked his converts to copy him as he copied 
Christ. The memory of what Jesus had been was always 
before his eyes. We feel that he was looking at the figure 
of Jesus when he penned the Thirteenth Chapter of First 
Corinthians. He got his conception of what love is and 
does, because Jesus had lived and died. Although he 
does not mention His name, this chapter is a portrait of 
Christ. 

No man has more accurately grasped the mind of Christ, 
although he is so little interested in the details of His 
earthly career. And it is significant that when Paul tries 
to portray that mind, he does not refer to something which 
Jesus did in Galilee or quote some of His sayings. He 
does not write: ‘‘Have in you the mind of Him who 
washed His disciples’ feet,” or ‘‘of Him who said, I am 
in the midst of you as One that serveth.”’ He illustrates 
Christ’s mind by setting forth the career of this heavenly 
Being who “‘existing in the form of God, emptied Him- 
self, taking the form of a servant, becoming obedient unto 


ACCORDING TO PAUL i, 


death, yea, the death of the cross.’’ It is the background 
of heaven, with the dark cross as the most obtrusive fact 
in the foreground, that is ever before Paul’s eyes. 

And the chief characteristic of this Christ for Paul is 
His amazing love: ‘‘Who loved me, and gave Himself 
up for me;’’ ““We are more than conquerors through Him 
that loved us.’”’ The chief thing in the world for which 
aman must strive is love. It is the fulfilling of every law; 
and it is the mightiest force in the universe because it 
brought Jesus to die. And this love of Jesus is for Paul 
a window through which he looks into the ultimate fact 
of existence: it shows him God. ‘The love of God, 
which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’’ Calvary is not the 
devotion of Jesus only: ‘“‘God commendeth His own 
love towards us in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ 
died for us.” 

Converted as Paul had been, not by the human Jesus, 
but by a heavenly Being, he stresses Christ’s connection 
with God. He is “‘the Son of His love,’’ His ‘“‘image’’ 
(a phrase which we still employ when we speak of a boy 
as the living image of his father) in whose face God’s 
glory shines and in whom in bodily presence God’s fulness 
dwells. Paul knows that Jesus was true Man. He 
dwells on His human descent from David, and speaks of 
Him as “‘born of a woman.’’ He does not mention a 
miraculous birth, nor does He tell us how He became Man. 
He uses the expression “‘He emptied Himself,’’ on which 
some theologians have tried to build a theory of the incar- 
nation; but that phrase, if you press it too far, only con- 
fuses us. We cannot conceive anyone emptying His mind 
of knowledge or His spirit of power. And we must re- 
member that Paul used it in a practical, not a theoretical, 
connection. People were quarrelling in the Philippian 
Church, and Paul felt that, like most quarrels, this was 
due to their taking themselves too seriously and being 
self-important. Paul pleads with them to do nothing in 


24 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


pride, but in lowliness of mind to count others better than 


themselves. Then he adds: ‘Have this mind in you! 


which was also in Christ Jesus, who emptied Himself.” 
We know well the spirit he was trying to foster; we are 
left in the dark as to how He who came from heaven be- 
came One like ourselves. 

It is the human life of Jesus which we most miss in 
Paul’s portrait. He tells us nothing of Jesus’ struggles 
and temptations, nothing of His prayers. Once he re- 
marks that ‘‘He was crucified through weakness,’ but he 
never dwells on the heroism and effort and faith of Jesus. 
Had we Paul’s portrait only, we should never know that 
Jesus Himself had a religious experience, that He walked 
by faith, that He had questions to solve and obstacles to 
overcome and temptation to grapple with. A man must 
paint what he sees, and to Paul Jesus is a triumphant 
Spirit, who had once taken on our human flesh and 
suffered, but was at His resurrection ‘‘designated the Son 
of God with power.” 

And in His power, He does not remain aloof from 
sinning men; He comes, as Paul had felt Him come on the 
Damascus Road, and lays hold of our inmost being and 
possesses us. Paul’s commonest description of a Christian 
is ‘‘a man in Christ.’’ He is employing a phrase which 
was familiar in that age when men believed in spirts who 
came and took possession of human beings and dwelt in 
them. One thinks of the demoniacs in the Gospels. 
Jesus, this mighty and loving Spirit, controls and possesses 
the lives of those who yield themselves to His sway. Paul 
cannot find language too strong to tell us that Christ 
becomes dominant at the center of a Christian's per- 
sonality, the well-spring of his motives and energies. 
“Christ who is our life,’’ he writes. 

And when Christ thus possesses us, we repeat the two 
great experiences of Jesus’ career as Paul thinks of them 
—His death and resurrection. “I am crucified with 


ee 


AGCORDING TO; PAUL 25 


Christ,’ “If ye then be risen with Christ.” This may 
seem exaggerated speech. But think how love makes two 
lives one, so that each seems to share the experiences of the 
other! Are there not mothers who in a very real sense 
go to boarding-school or to college with their sons or 
daughters, although they may never see the actual school 
buildings or college campus, where son or daughter is? 
Their hearts are with them. They sympathize in their 
disappointments; they share their happinesses. When 
they go on to see their children graduate, they seem to 
know the scene already and to be acquainted with their 
children’s friends. They have been living not only their 
own life at home, but living this school or college life. 
So Paul felt that he died to the forces which killed Jesus, 
and he rose to the life Jesus ever lives with God. 

And Jesus was to him not just a personal Friend with 
whom he was closely knit by cords of sympathy. He 
was the second Adam, the Founder of a new race of men. 
Whatever Jesus gained, He passed on by spiritual in- 
heritance to His followers. Think of the famous saying: 


‘‘As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive.” 
A_man can choose the stream of spiritual heredity which, 


he wishes.to have flow in his soul. If he chooses Adam, 
the natural life of selfish and sinning men, then he has in 
himself the seeds of death. If he chooses Christ, then he 
dies to sin and is alive to all for which Christ lives. 

You remember Marc Antony’s oft-quoted speech in 
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: 


I tell you that which you yourselves do know; 
Show you sweet Caesar’s wounds, poor poor dumb mouths, 
And bid them speak for me..... 


O, what a fall was there, my countrymen! 
Then I, and you, and all of us fell down, 
While bloody treason flourish’d over us, 


26 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


So Paul would say that while Christ was nailed on the 
cross, all His followers throughout the ages died, while 
murderous sin flourished and had its day of power. And 
when Christ conquered death, all His followers rise with 
Him to His deathless life of love in God. ‘‘Ye died, and 
your life is hid with Christ in God.”’ 

Paul sometimes uses the phrase ‘‘my gospel,’’ as though 
out of his own experience of Jesus Christ he could pen 
an evangel all his own. And he did. His portrait of 
Christ is that of the crucified and risen Lord who becomes 
the inmost Life of a believer’s heart and leads that man 
through His own death to sin and into His own life with 
God. 

And what is that portrait’s special value to us? 

First, its insistence that eyery Christian must be himself 
the holy land where Christ is born, and where He dwells. 
Paul tells the Galatians that he is in travail for them ‘‘until 
Christ be formed in you.’’ We may wish that Paul had 
told us more of the Jesus of history. How many things 
he must have picked up from the Christians whom he 
persecuted, and later from the apostles with whom he 
spent enriching days, which he never put into any of his 
letters! But let us remember the limits of history. We 
may know a great deal about what happened in Palestine 
nineteen hundred years ago, and not be any more Christian 
for that knowledge. We may know relatively little about 
history, and yet have caught from the little we know of 
the career of Jesus the spirit of His life. It is not the 


amount of our informati but the responsi our 
hearts to the impression Jesus makes, which counts, En- 


tirely in line with Paul’s thought, a mystic poet of the 
Seventeenth Century, first a Lutheran and later a Roman 
Catholic, Johannes Scheffler, has written: 


Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born, 
If He's not born in thee, thy soul is still forlorn, 


ACCORDING TO PAUL Zi, 


The cross on Golgotha will never save thy soul, 
The cross in thine own heart alone can make thee whole. 


Christ rose not from the dead, Christ still is in the grave, 
If thou for whom he died art still of sin the slave. 


They are only assured believers in Christ, whose con- 
viction rests not merely upon happenings in the past, for| 
which they must depend upon the testimony of others, but 
upon happenings in themselves, of which they are firsthand 
witnesses. Whittier has voiced this personal experience 
of Christ: 


In joy of inward peace, or sense 
Of sorrow over sin, 

He is His own best evidence, 
His witness is within. 


No fable old, nor mythic lore, 
Nor dream of bards and seers, 
No dead fact stranded on the shore 
Of the oblivious years;— 


— 


But warm, sweet, tender, even yet 
A present help is He; 

And faith has still its Olivet, 
And love its Galilee. 


And the late Dr. Maltbie Babcock wrote: 


I envy not the Twelve, nearer to me is He; 
The life He once lived here on earth, He lives again in me. 


Ascended now to God, my witness there to be, 
His witness here am I, because His Spirit dwells in me. 


To these men, as to Paul, Christ is the life within them- 
selves. 


In the second place, the stress which Paul’s portrait?’ ~ i 


places on Christ as the link attaching the Christian to all’™ 
power in God. Sometimes he speaks of Christians as not rie 
only crucified and risen with Christ, but also as already 
ascended with Him in the heavenly regions, comrades now 


28 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


of God’s life and sharers of His might. At other times 
Paul places Christ at God’s right hand in the supreme place’ 
of power, and pictures Christians as joined to Him and 
one with Him as a body is one with the head. Both 
pictures present Christ connecting His followers with God 
Himself and supplying them with His incalculable 
resources. When one surveys the career of Paul—the 
sheer drive of the man as he goes from city to city, through 
scourgings and stonings and imprisonments and _ ship- 
wrecks, thinking out profoundest questions, hunting up a 
runaway slave, establishing churches, preaching, teaching, 
writing letters, carrying everybody's burdens—these pic- 
tures stand for an indisputable fact in his experience. 
Paul spoke from this experience when he said that to have 
Christ dwelling in the heart by faith is to be “‘filled unto 
are the fulness of God.” 

Certain engineers have proposed to impound the waters 
which sweep in with the tide in the Bay of Fundy, and 
to furnish power to all the New England states. What 
a vision of the energy of the vast Atlantic brought to 
towns to run the machinery of factories and to operate 
transit systems, and carried to countless homes and remote 
cottages to supply them with light and heat. Think of 
the might of an ocean-tide sweeping up to an isolated 
farmhouse on an inland hillside to warm and brighten it! 

Paul’s portrait of Jesus kindles the imagination as he 
represents the outflow of God’s fulness in Christ, bringing 
the vasty deeps of the spiritual universe to a Christian’s 
heart to reinforce him against temptation, to break habits, 
to master fears, to uproot selfishness, and to empower him 
to subdue a whole world to love. With such a spiritual 
connection prospects of boundless development unfold: 
“Christ in you the hope of glory.’’ With such a connec- 
tion a Christian feels himself adequate for any strain or 
any undertaking: ‘I can do all things in Him that 
strengtheneth me;’’ “I labor, striving according to His 


ACCORDING TO PAUL ae 


working, which worketh in me mightily.” Where will 
you find a sublimer assurance of possessing an alliance 
with all the mighty forces of existence than this: “All 
things are yours: whether the world or life or death, or 
things present or things to come: all are yours; and ye are 
Christ’s [there is the connecting link] for Christ is God’s.” 

Are we “‘in Christ,’’ committed to Him, and through 
Him made at one with God? 


GHAPTER SIT 


THE PORTRAIT IN THE GOSPEL ACCORDING 
TO MARK 


Readers of Mark Twain’s Autobiography may recall 
how one day he read in the morning newspaper a vivid 
account of a debate in Congress over an incident which 
bad occurred in the White House under Mr. Roosevelt's 
administration, and inserted the entire narrative in the 
Autobiography as an illustration of his ideal of style that 
would live. 


When an eye-witness sets down in narrative form 
some extraordinary occurrence which he has wit- 
nessed, that is news—that is the news form, and its 
interest is absolutely indestructible; time can have no 
deteriorating effect upon that episode. If any stray 
copy of this book shall, by any chance, escape the 
paper-mill for a century or so, and then be discovered 
and read, I am betting that that remote reader will 
find that this account is still news and that it is just 
as interesting as any news he will find in the news- 
paper of his day and morning—if newspapers shall 
still be in existence then. 


The four biographies with which our New Testament 
opens are called gospels, which means “good news,” and 
the earliest of them to be written, that of St. Mark, is 
penned in just that graphic style of the report which so 
keen a judge of language as Mark Twain declared ‘‘able to 
carry along with it for ages and ages the very same 
interest’? which it had for its first readers. 


30 


ACCORDING TO MARK 31 


In the earliest preaching we have seen Jesus pictured as 
exalted at God’s right hand in the heavens, and in Paul’s 
letters we have seen Him portrayed also as a life-giving 
Spirit in the hearts of His followers. “TThe Jesus of Galilee 
and of Jerusalem seems almost blotted out by this glorified 
spiritual Being. But the Man who had taught and 
healed and suffered had left too vital a memory to be 
effaced. 

Scholars seem fairly agreed that none of our gospels in 
their present forms is from the pen of an eye-witness; but 
there is an early and apparently trustworthy tradition that 
John Mark recorded the reminiscences of Peter, and his 
narrative has touches which would seem to bear this out. 
It begins and ends with special mention of this apostle. 
It sets on its first page the call of Peter and his brother, 
Jesus’ going to their house and curing Simon’s wife's 
mother, and the statement that Jesus’ retirement for prayer 
was interrupted by ‘“‘Simon and they that were with him.” 
On its last page is the message of the angel in the empty 
tomb; ‘‘Go, tell His disciples and Peter.’’ Mark’s home 
was in Jerusalem, where his mother’s house was a resort of 
the early Christians. He may himself have been an eye- 
witness of some of the closing events in Jesus’ life, and 
many think he placed himself in the dim background of 
the portrait in the nameless young man who was nearly 
arrested in the garden and ran away leaving his clothes in 
the hands of his would-be captors. In that home there 
would be much talk of what Jesus had said and done. 
Mark had been a missionary helper of Barnabas and Paul, 
as well as of Peter; and out of this experience he compiled 
his gospel for non-Jewish readers, translating Aramaic 
words and explaining Palestinian customs. Whoever his 
first readers were, he appears to be connecting them with 
the events he records when he mentions that Simon of 
Cyrene, who carried Christ’s cross, was “‘the father of 
Alexander and Rufus,’ implying that Alexander and 


Dz THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


Rufus were known to them. It is a portrait of Jesus 
drawn somewhere about 70 A. D. to aid the missionary 
cause. 

Mark writes in a simple, colloquial style, and with an 
artistic skill which makes his readers feel themselves on 
the scene and watching what he describes. A favorite 
introduction is “‘and Jesus began to.’ ‘‘He began to 
teach by the sea side’; “‘He called unto Him the twelve 
and began to send them forth’; in Gethsemane “‘He began 
to be greatly amazed and sore troubled.’ It is a phrase 
which piques curiosity to look for what may follow. He 
reports what is said in direct quotations so that we think 
ourselves listening to the speakers. ‘‘Jesus said unto the 
sea, Peace be still’’; to the demoniac ‘“‘Come forth, thou 
unclean spirit, out of the man’’; to the disciples, ““Come 
ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest awhile.” 
Matthew and Luke, with Mark’s vivid narrative in their 
hands, condense it to “‘He rebuked the winds and the sea.’’ 
Not only does Mark make us hear the actual conversation, 
but he often preserves the Aramaic words which Jesus 
used, although his first readers, like ourselves, had to have 
them translated. It is Mark who tells us that Jesus said 
to Jairus’ daughter: ‘Talitha cumi, Damsel, arise’: to 
the deaf and dumb man “‘Ephphatha, Be opened’’; that He 
named James and John “‘Boanerges, sons of thunder,’’ and 
quoted the word ‘“‘Korban, dedicated’’ which men used of 
their gifts; and it is Mark, whom Matthew copies, to 
whom we owe the syllables overheard from Jesus’ dying 
lips: “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.’’ Mark is fond of 
recording occurrences in the present tense as though they 
were just happening: ‘“There cometh to Him a leper’; 
“They come, bringing unto Him a man sick of the palsy”; 
“He goeth up into the mountain, and calleth unto Him.” 
Mark tries to make us see Jesus’ gestures and movements: 
in the synagogue “‘He looked round about on them with 
anger’; He “‘turned Him about in the press’’ to see who 


ACCORDING TO MARK 33 


had touched Him; He “‘looked up to heaven’ when He 
gave thanks with the loaves and fishes; He took little 
children “‘up in His arms and laid His hands upon them’’; 
when the young ruler ran to Him, Jesus “‘beholding him, 
loved him’’; in the temple He “looked round about upon 
all things.”’ 

Mark inserts details which the other evangelists con- 
sider irrelevant. He reports that the swine “‘ran violently 
down a steep place into the sea’; that the disciples were 
sent out “two and two’’; that the five thousand sat down 
““‘by companies upon the green grass’’ (what a vivid touch 
of color!) and that they reclined in groups ‘“‘by hundreds 
and by fifties’; that Jesus was “‘in the hinder part of the 
ship, asleep on the pillow’’; that He “‘sat down over 
against the treasury’’ watching how gifts were brought; 
that Peter ‘“‘went out into the porch’’; and that at the 
crucifixion the centurion “‘stood over against Jesus.” 
Listen to two graphic descriptions of cures. Here is that 
of the deaf and dumb: 


And He took him aside from the multitude 
privately, and put His fingers into his ears, and He 
spat, and touched his tongue; and looking up to 
heaven, He sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, 
that is, Be opened. 


And here is His healing of a blind man: 


He took hold of him by the hand, and brought 
him out of the village: and when He had spit on his 
eyes, and laid His hands upon him, He asked him, 
Seest thou aught? And he looked up and saith, I 
see men; for I behold them as trees, walking. Then 
again He laid His hands upon his eyes and he looked 
steadfastly, and was restored, and saw all things 
clearly. 


ah THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


The other evangelists appear to have thought that it 
detracted from Jesus’ power to mention the steps in the 
process of a cure: but Mark lets us see the personal atten- 
tion Jesus gave, the pains He took, and the effort which it 
cost Him to communicate His strength. 

Mark’s portrait makes Jesus move breathlessly from 
event to event because he so often uses the adverb 
“‘straightway.’’ One can count it forty times. Listen to 
the first sabbath in Capernaum: 


And they go into Capernaum; and straightway on 
the sabbath day He entered into the synagogue and 
taught. And straightway there was in the syna- 
gogue a man with an unclean spirit. And straight- 
way, when they were come out of the synagogue, 
they came into the house of Simon and Andrew, with 
James and John. Now Simon’s wife’s mother lay 
sick of a fever; and straightway they tell Him of her. 


It is a gospel which ought to be particularly intelligible 
to hurried city-dwellers. Jesus is often interrupted and 
constantly under pressure: 


In the morning a great while before day, He rose 
and went out [to pray]. And Simon and they that 
were with him followed after Him: and they found 
Him, and say unto Him, All are seeking Thee. 

Again: For there were many coming and going, 
and they had no leisure so much as to eat. 


This impression of hurry is enhanced by piling incident 
on incident, and linking them, as is common in Hebrew 
writing, by a simple ‘‘and.’”’ Run your eye over the 
gospel in the Revised Version, where the material is divided 
into paragraphs, and you will notice that almost every sec- 
tion begins with “‘And.’’ (In the Greek edition of 
Westcott and Hort, all but eleven of the ninety sections 


ACCORDING TO MARK Sey 


begin with the Greek word for ‘‘and.”’) Here is a 
sequence in the last week: 


And while He was in Bethany in the house of 
Simon the leper, as He sat at meat, there came a 
woman. 

And Judas Iscariot, he that was one of the twelve, 
went away unto the chief priests. 

And on the first day of unleavened bread, when 
they sacrificed the passover, His disciples say unto 
Him. 

And when it was evening He cometh with the 
twelve. 

And as they were eating, He took bread. 

And when they had sung a hymn they went out. 

And they come into a place, which was named 
Gethsemane. 


Nor is it only that paragraph is added to paragraph in 
this way, but in a single scene happening is heaped upon 
happening. Listen to the opening of the account of what 
took place in the garden: 


And they come unto a place which was named 
Gethsemane: and He saith unto His disciples, Sit 
ye here, while I pray. And He taketh with Him 
Peter, James, and John, and began to be greatly 
amazed and sore troubled. And He saith unto 
them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto 
death: abide ye here, and watch. And He went 
forward a little, and fell on the ground, and prayed. 


Hebrew has few connectives, and Mark thinks in Hebrew, 
but both in Greek and in English this monotonous “‘and”’ 
is striking. In tragic passages it sounds like the tolling 
of a bell. 

The outstanding characteristic of Jesus in this portrait 
is power—power in teaching, in cures, in influence over 


36 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


men, in death, in resurrection. The evangelist dwells on | 
the effect Jesus produces: 

He calls fishermen, ‘‘and straightway they left the nets 
and followed Him.” 

In the synagogue, ‘‘they were astonished at His 
teaching.” 

After the cure of the demoniac, “they were all 
amazed.” 

Nor does this effect wear off. Repeatedly it occurs in 
the experience of the disciples: 


They understood not the saying, and were afraid 
to ask Him. | 

And they were in the way, going up to Jerusalem; 
and they that followed were afraid. 


It is the final impression which the gospel, as we now have 
it, leaves with us; for its original ending has been lost, and 
the present conclusion is a later addition. ‘The last words 
of Mark’s narrative are: 


And they went out and fled from the tomb; for 
trembling and astonishment had come upon them; 
and they said nothing to any one; for they were 
afraid. 


The late Dr. Steinmetz used to take visitors into a 
laboratory of the General Electric Company in Schenec- 
tady, and make terrific bolts of lightning shoot about, 
while they sat with protecting glasses over their eyes and 
with stuffed ears, feeling themselves at the center of a 
tremendous storm. Mark carries us back to Palestine and 
sets us as onlookers at a Life which in word and act and 
endurance, and in the love manifest in them all, is an 
astounding display of the might of God. 

Yet this portrait renders Jesus perhaps more human than 
any of the other New Testament pictures. Mark alone 
speaks of Jesus as “‘the carpenter,’’ and tells us that at 


ACCORDING TO MARK 37 


Nazareth He could not do mighty works; that He was 
angry; that He wondered; that He sighed; that He con- 
fessed ignorance—‘‘Of that day or that hour knoweth no 
one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son.” 
Mark stresses the longing of Jesus for solitude when 
clamant demands were made on His time and strength. 
And on Mark’s pages the last word from Jesus’ dying 
lips is the tragic cry: ‘“‘My God, why hast Thou for- 
saken Me?’’ Contrast that with Luke’s serene: ‘Father, 
into Thy hands I commend My spirit’; and John’s ex- 
ultant: ‘It is finished.’’ Mark’s realism does not shrink 
from putting into the portrait traces of human passion 
and weakness and ignorance, which later evangelists 
omitted. His portrait sets us closer than any other to the 
Man of Nazareth, of Capernaum, of Gethsemane, and of 
Golgotha. 

We today would be more impressed with Jesus’ power 
in such matchless stories as the Good Samaritan and the 
Prodigal Son, which Luke records, than in many of these 
accounts of miracles; but Mark as a practical missionary 
knew what appealed to those with whom he worked. He 
will make them see the actual human Figure moving and 
working, and feel the power of God. 

How then does he account for this astonishing power 
in Jesus? ‘There is no suggestion that in Him a pre-exist- 
ent heavenly Spirit has become Man, as Paul pictures Him. 
There is no hint of a miraculous birth. Jesus is intro- 
duced in full manhood, coming up to John’s baptism, and 
there receiving an endowment of the Spirit and hearing a 
Voice which calls Him God’s Son, the Chosen to bring in 
the kingdom. If you recall the statements ascribed to 
Peter in the Acts concerning Jesus’ career, it would seem 
that Mark has taken his outline and filled it in: 


Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God unto 
you by mighty works and wonders and signs, which 


38 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


God did by Him in the midst of you; * * * God 
anointed Him with the Holy Spirit and with power, 
who went about doing good, and healing all that 
were oppressed of the devil; for God was with Him. 


Jesus is no less divine to Mark than to Paul, although 
Mark pictures, as Paul does not, the Man who is Himself 
dependent on God, who is tempted, who is limited in 
power and knowledge, who prays, who struggles, who 
goes down into the depths of God-forsakenness. ‘To 
Mark, Jesus is the Son of God, the Messiah, the supreme 
and final Representative sent to men: ‘‘He had yet One, 
a beloved Son: He sent Him last unto them, saying, They 
will reverence My Son.’ This Messiah is recognized by 
Peter and the disciples. He declares Himself dramatically 
before the Sanhedrin: 


The high priest asked Him, Art Thou the Christ, 
the Son of the Blessed? And Jesus said, | am; and 
ye shall see the Son of man sitting at the right hand 
of power, and coming with the clouds of heaven. 


The impression which Jesus makes reaches its climax on 
the cross, when a Roman officer, speaking for the Gentile 
public for whom Mark is painting this portrait, a man 
familiar with force and heroic courage, now confronting 
that which to him surpasses human attainment, confesses: 
“Truly this Man was a Son of God.” 

Mark’s vivid picture omits much that we prize. It in- 
cludes far fewer sayings of Jesus than Matthew or Luke, 
although it preserves one charming parable which they 
overlook—the seed growing of itself, first the blade, then 
the ear, then the full corn in the ear. It affords no glimpse 
of the Child Jesus. It offers no interpretation of Him as 
the Life and Light of the soul such as John supplies us. 
But with a swift succession of life-like sketches, it brings 
Jesus before our eyes, speaking with authority, touching 


ACCORDING TO MARK 39 


helpless men with potent hands, lifting little children in 
His arms, training disciples, challenged by bitter oppon- 
ents, facing the mystery of death, giving His life a ransom 
for many, buried, raised from the dead, and “going be- 
fore’ His disciples to be followed and known of them. 

What is its special appeal for us? 

First, for that large group of persons who feel that if 
there was anything unusual in Jesus’ origin, He is of no 
value to them as an example, here is a portrait which 
presents a Man endowed with power in response to His 
own obedience and trust. “[here are various casts of mind 
in the Church of our time, as there were in the Church at 
the beginning. We do well to remind ourselves that the 
New Testament contains a variety of interpretations of its 
Lord. Mark’s picture appeals to those who are unsym- 
pathetic with a narrative which starts with a miraculous 
birth or with the incarnation of a pre-existing Being. 
There is always a danger that such minds may think Jesus 
impossible for them because they cannot surmount this 
initial difficulty. Let them begin just where this gospel 
begins, with the Man Jesus, and then go on to discover 
with Him His surprises of Divine power. 

Second, there are temperaments to whom the mystical 
Christ of Paul and of John, the Christ within the soul, is 
unintelligible. “They are practically minded folk who look 
out and not in, and the portrait of a Christ alive at the 
center of their beings seems to them fanciful. Let Mark 
tell them what discipleship meant to the original twelve. 
Jesus appointed them “‘that they might be with Him, and 
that He might send them forth to preach, and to have 
power to cast out demons.”” ‘There is a threefold descrip- 
tion of the Christian life; to be “‘with Jesus’’—and Mark’s 
realistic portrait is well fitted to keep Jesus livingly before 
us: to be sent forth on Christ’s business to Christianize 
every sphere of human life—a purpose on which we are all 
agreed, although many of us are not conspicuously active 


40 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


in its achievement; and to have power to master the dia- | 
holical factors in our world, a power which comes from 
contact with Jesus infecting us with His faith and hope 
and love. Paul pictures the mind of Christ by presenting 
a celestial Being in the form of God who stoops to earth 
to serve as a Man among men; Mark pictures it by showing 
the hand of the human Jesus reaching out to touch a con- 
taminating leper. It is the same mind into which we 
look through both portraits. “To be Christians is to pos- 
sess that mind, whether we think of its becoming ours by 
a recreating Spirit alive within us, or by our living with 
this Figure before our eyes and catching the tone and 
temper and vigor of His life. 

Third, the virile and forceful Jesus of this portrait is 
both a wholesome corrective of the effeminate Christ 
whom Christian art has set forth, and the aggressive 
Leader whom the Church of our time needs to recall. 
‘There is a widespread feeling that Christianity is barely 
holding its own. One can see paganism rampant in litera- 
ture and in life all about us. A pioneer missionary, faced 
with the crass and cruel heathenism of the imperial Ro- 
man world, drew this portrait of an irresistible Jesus, be- 
fore whom even a hardened official charged with a bloody 
execution bowed in reverence. Such is the impressive 
Christ, who once lived and died, and who “‘goes before’’ 
His followers to be known of us and proclaimed in His im- 
pressiveness, as St. Mark drew Him. 

Finally, there is much talk about Christ, and even some 
fellowship with Him, which is lacking in awe. Men both 
outside and inside the Christian Church speak of Him with 
unbated breath, as an interesting item in the world’s con- 
glomerate history. In religion we are only helped by that 
before which we are on our knees in adoration. This 
portrait, in many ways the most human picture of Jesus, 
presents One who frightens those who know Him best. 
They are in the presence of a Man whose power in speech 


ACCORDING TO MARK cu 


and act and patience and devotion startles them. They 
never get over being surprised. ‘“They were amazed 
straightway with a great amazement.’ Is it not a true 
picture of Jesus, verified again and again by those who 
think enough about Him and live sufficiently by His power 
to know? 


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CHAPTER IV 


THE PORTRAIT IN THE GOSPEL ACCORDING 
TO MATTHEW 


A portrait differs from a snapshot. The instantaneous 
photograph catches its subject in a single pose, which may 
or may not be typical; the portrait is the artist’s attempt 
to give the permanent impression of the man. 


As when a painter, poring on a face, 
Divinely through all hindrance finds the man 
Behind it, and so paints him that his face, 
The shape and color of a mind and life, 
Lives for his children, ever at its best 

And fullest. 


An artist composes a portrait, putting together details 
which may never have been found at the same moment in 
actual life, and omitting others which blur or confuse the 
dominant impression. Our gospels are not a series of 
snapshots, but carefully composed pictures, where the 
order of events or their location in definite places is for- 
gotten in the effort to portray the character of Jesus as the 
Lord of men. 

‘The skilled artist to whom we owe the first portrait in 
our present New Testament has drawn his materials from 
various sources. Nearly the whole narrative of Mark is 
here, smoothed and often condensed. Into this, as a frame- 
work, is fitted a collection of the Sayings of Jesus, which 
we also find in slightly different form in Luke. There is 
an early tradition that the Apostle Matthew wrote the 
Sayings of Jesus in Hebrew, and it is generally thought 


42 


ACCORDING TO MATTHEW 43 


that this collection of Jesus’ words is here, and so has 
given to this book the title, ““The Gospel according to 
Matthew.’’ Besides this collection, the evangelist had 
additional sources—another collection of Jesus’ teachings 
—for he has given us eight parables which neither Mark 
nor Luke record, and the traditions on which he draws for 
Jesus’ birth and His appearance after the resurrection. 


In composing his portrait he groups his material, mass- 
ing a large number of sayings in what we call ‘‘the Ser- 
mon on the Mount’’—sayings which Luke connects with 
various occasions; bringing together parables or instruc- 
tions to the disciples which treat similar subjects; and ar- 
ranging in a series Jesus’ mighty works. A good teacher 
knows the value of numbering his points. This evangelist 
begins with a genealogy divided into three sections—from 
Abraham to David, from David to the Captivity, from 
the Captivity to the birth of the Messiah—and under 
each section places twice seven generations. ‘“[hrees and 
sevens are favorite numbers with him; three comparisons 
of Jesus as greater than the temple, than Jonah, than 
Solomon; three parables on the judgment—the virgins, 
the talents, the sheep and goats; seven clauses in the Lord’s 
prayer, seven parables of the kingdom, seven woes. He 
seems also to have had an odd liking for two figures on 
his canvas, where Mark and Luke place only one—two 
Gadarene demoniacs, two blind men at Jericho, and 
(strangest of all) two asses in Christ’s entry into Jeru- 
salem. 

He has some characteristic expressions, notably ‘‘the 
kingdom of heaven,’’ which he uses where the others 
speak of the kingdom of God. Instead of Mark’s breath- 
less narrative, he moves along with introductions such as 
“and it came to pass,” “‘and behold,’ ‘‘at that season,”’ 


now.” This helps to render the portrait more quietly 
devout. 


a4 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


More important are the colors in which he presents the 
figure of Jesus. 

First, in Old Testament colors, the Fulfiller of prophecy. 
Time and again we hear such expressions as ‘‘Now all this 
is come to pass, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken 
by the Lord through the prophet.’”’ To us a number of 
the passages cited seem no predictions at all. For instance, 
Hosea had spoken of God’s kindness to His people in the 
national infancy: ‘““When Israel was a child, then I loved 
him, and called my son out of Egypt’’ This evangelist, 
caught by the two words “‘son’’ and “Egypt,” takes it as 
a prophecy of Joseph’s flight with the Child Jesus. ‘hese 
Old Testament quotations are interesting to us not so 
much as fulfilled predictions, but as the tints in which the 
evangelist sees Jesus as the Light of a darkened world, 
(“To them that sat in the region and shadow of death, to 
them did light spring up,’’ 4: 15, 16), the Bearer of hu- 
manity’s ills, (‘That it might be fulfilled which was 
spoken through the prophet Isaiah, saying, Himself took 
our infirmities and bare our sicknesses,’’ 8: 17), the con- 
siderate Servant of the Lord, who does not break bruised 
reeds or put out dimly flickering wicks (12: 18-21). One 
of the evangelist’s quotations we cannot locate: “‘He shall 
be calied a Nazarene’; another from Zechariah is mistak- 
enly ascribed to Jeremiah. This will pain those who wish 
an inerrant Bible; but those to whom errors in detail are 
trifling and inevitable, or who may even feel the evangelist 
more like ourselves because of this slip of memory, are 
satisfied with the insight which saw in Jesus, who was so 
unlike the Messiah of many devout anticipations, the true 
goal of Israel’s hope. “The Jews had three chief religious 
treasures: the Law, the Temple, and the Messiah. ‘This 
evangelist portrays Jesus as a Law-giver on the mount, 
whose precepts contain the righteousness of the old Law 
and better; a greater than the Temple in whose Person 
God, once sought in the holy of holies, is present—Im- 


ACCORDING TO MATTHEW 45 


manuel; and the royal Deliverer who saves His people from 
their sins. | 

Second, he pictures Him in Jewish colors, a Patriot but 
in bitter conflict with His nation. No portrait is so thor- 
oughly Jewish. Jesus insists on the ancestral religion: 


Think not that I came to destroy the law or the 
prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfill. For 
verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass 
away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away 
from the law, till all things be accomplished. 


He urges respect for the official religious teachers. 


The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat: 
all things therefore whatsoever they bid you, these 
do and observe. 


He speaks of His own mission as restricted to Jews, and 
confines His disciples within the same limits: 


I was not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house 
of Israel. * * * Go not into any way of the Gen- 
tiles, and enter not into any city of the Samaritans. 


In no other New Testament writing do we find such 
extreme nationalism; but in no other do we hear such 
denunciation of Jewish opposition. Think of the seven 
times repeated ‘“Woe unto you, scribes, Pharisees, hypo- 
crites,’ and of the laments over Jewish cities: ‘“Woe unto 
thee Chorazin!”’ ‘“‘woe unto thee Bethsaida!’’ ‘‘and thou, 
Capernaum!’’ No other is so insistent on Israel’s doom: 
“The kingdom of God shall be taken away from you, and 
shall be given to a nation bringing forth the fruits there- 
of.’ He records the fateful cry before Pilate’s judgment- 
seat, when the Gentile governor washes his hands: ‘‘His 
blood be upon us and our children.’’ And he adds to one 
of the parables, evidently recalling the destruction of Jeru- 
salem by the Romans: ‘‘The king was wroth; and he sent 


46 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


his armies, and destroyed those murderers, and burned 
their city.”’ This is the portrait of Jesus the Jew, but the 
Doomsman of an unresponsive nation. 

Third, he portrays Him as the Saviour of the world. 
His first chapter depicts Him as the Heir of Abraham and 
David: his second shows the wise men coming from afar 
with their gifts. Even in the genealogy there are hints that 
this royally Jewish blood is not all Jewish, for Rahab the 
Canaanitess and Ruth the Moabitess are in that line of 
ancestry. At the center of the gospel, Jesus’ highest praise 
is given to a Roman centurion: “I have not found so great 
faith, no not in Israel.’’ Further on, it is a Canaanitish 
woman who overcomes His resolve to serve Jews only and 
gains her daughter’s cure. Later, a Roman woman, Pilate’s 
wife, intercedes for His life, when His own people are 
crying to crucify Him. And the gospel closes with the 
great commission: “‘Go ye and make disciples of all the 
nations.” This Jewish Messiah is for the whole world. 
It has been said that the evangelist unconsciously sketched 
his own portrait in the scribe instructed unto the kingdom 
who brings out of his treasure ‘‘things new and old.” He 
prizes the religion of patriarchs and prophets; he appre- 
ciates the novelties of Jesus; and he keeps both. His out- 
look is reflected in the words: 


I say unto you that many shall come from the east 
and from the west, and shall sit down with Abraham 
and Isaac and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven. 


The ‘‘many’’ are the new-comers of the evangelist’s own 
day from the non-Jewish world, for he was writing about 
the last quarter of the First Century, after Paul and others 
had done their work; but they “‘sit down with Abraham 
and Isaac and Jacob’’—representatives of the historic faith 
of Israel. 

Fourth, he paints Jesus in ecclesiastical colors as the 
Founder of the Church. This is the only gospel in which 


ACCORDING TO MATTHEW he 


that word occurs. We do not know whether we hear the 
evangelist’s interpretation or Jesus’ own words, which 
other gospels omit, in the saying to Peter: ““Upon this rock 
I will build My Church.”’” In another passage the evan- 
gelist certainly expands Jesus’ words in order to counsel 
his readers. Jesus had said: “If thy brother sin against 
thee, go, show him his fault between thee and him alone.’’ 
But the case must often have come up where the brother 
refused to listen. What then? ‘The evangelist offers his 
advice: ‘“Take with thee one or two more’’; and if that 
fails: ““Tell it unto the Church.’’ That saying would 
have had no meaning in Jesus’ lifetime when the Church 
was not yet in existence. The Jesus of this portrait is 
establishing an institution. In His last command He is 
made to stress a sacrament: “‘Go ye and make disciples, 
baptizing them.’’ ‘The nation Israel is doomed; its suc- 
cessor is the Christian Church in which Jew and Gentile 
together, obeying this Divine King, work and wait for the 
kingdom of heaven. 

This portrait of Jesus pictures Him as truly human, but 
the evangelist omits from Mark’s account all allusion to 
limitations of Jesus’ knowledge or power, and all refer- 
ences to such emotions as anger, or sighing, or wonder. In 
Mark’s picture Jesus asks the young ruler: ‘‘Why callest 
thou Me good?’’ Our evangelist cannot see how anyone 
could help calling Jesus good, and alters it to: ‘““Why 
askest thou Me concerning that which is good?”’ 

He portrays Him as the Son of God, and he carries back 
Jesus’ possession of the Holy Spirit from the baptism to 
a miraculous birth. Jesus is conceived by the Spirit in 
Mary's womb. Nothing is said of a pre-existence in 
heaven; and it is worth noting that no New Testament 
writer who speaks of the pre-existing heavenly Being re- 
fers to a conception by the Spirit in a virgin mother. Ap- 
parently these were originally two methods of accounting 
for the uniqueness of Jesus. “The Church later combined 


48 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


them, when the books which form our New Testament 
were put together. In all our portraits Jesus is Divine 
and comes from God—in the earliest preaching He is 
‘“‘made Lord and Christ’’ at the resurrection, in Mark by 
the Spirit at the baptism, in Matthew by the Spirit in 
Mary’s womb, in Paul He was “‘in the form of God” and 
emptied Himself to become man. Is it not a supreme 
tribute to Jesus, that He was so marvellous, that many 
explanations of His Divinity are suggested? In this Gos- 
pel according to Matthew there are three:—His descent 
from Abraham and David, His miraculous birth (not 
easily combined with the ancestry which is traced through 
Joseph), and the anointing at the Jordan with the Spirit. 
How inevitably Jesus raises the question this evangelist re- 
ports in the synagogue at Nazareth: ‘“‘Whence hath this 
Man all these things?’ 

What, then, is the present significance of this evangelist’s 
portrait of Jesus? 

To begin with it is far and away the most important of 
all the pictures of Christ, both because it tells us more 
about Him than we find in any other single book, and be- 
cause, standing first in the New Testament, it is the gospel 
which is oftenest read by the vast majority of Christians. 
When anyone wants to know what Jesus taught and did, 
he opens his Bible and naturally starts with Matthew. It 
is this gospel’s version of the Lord’s Prayer which is every- 
where memorized and used in churches, this arrangement 
of the Beatitudes which is learned by heart, this statement 
of the Great Commission which is taken as “‘the marching 
orders’’ of the Church. If one were asked to name the 
most influential book ever written, he ought to reply “‘The 
Gospel according to Matthew.” 

Further, this portrait of Jesus is admirably fitted to 
stand at the close of the Old Testament and on the thres- 
hold of the New. It does not minimize the revolutionary 
novelty of Jesus: ‘‘Ye have heard that it was said, but I 





ACCORDING TO MATTHEW 49 


say unto you.” At the same time the Law and the Proph- 
ets are tenderly cherished, and the religion of Israel is not 
discarded but conserved and completed. There are still 
many Christians, usually not well-informed persons, who 
speak disparagingly of the Old Testament. It would be 
well for them to sit down and inquire in what respects 
the God in whom Jesus believed, and the life to which He 
called men, differ from the God and the devout life of the 
psalmists and prophets and wise men of Israel. This evan- 
gelist is entirely correct when he paints Jesus in Old Testa- 
ment colors as a loyal Jew, the rightful Heir of Hebrew 
convictions and ideals. “The early Church was right when 
it kept the Old Testament as its sacred book. It was on 
these scriptures that Jesus’ soul was nourished, in their 
atmosphere that His mind thought, in its language that He 
expressed His faith and purpose, and by its guidance that 
He shaped His own career. We must use His freedom in 
distinguishing less and more valuable elements in the He- 
brew Bible, the temporary and the permanent; but its 
main convictions about God and man abide as the center 
of the Christian religion. 

Moreover this portrait brings into prominence certain 
aspects of Jesus which were in danger of being overlooked. 
We have seen that in the earliest preaching not one of His 
sayings is quoted and that Paul seldom mentions them. 
While Mark presents Jesus as a Teacher, he does not te- 
port much of His teaching. In this picture Jesus is pre- 
eminently a Teacher; the crowds in Jerusalem on Palm 
Sunday speak of Him as ‘‘the Prophet’’; and in this gos- 
pel are set down more of His teachings than in any other. 
Indeed if anyone today talks of the teaching of Christ, he 
is probably thinking of something in the Sermon on the 
Mount as it stands in this book. Jesus is presented as the 
authoritative Teacher: ‘Verily I say unto you’’ is the fa- 
miliar introduction to His statements. To list the para- 
bles and sayings which we owe to this evangelist only, 


50 PORTRAITS OF JESUS CHRIST 


supplies us with an impressive record of his vast contribu- 
tion to the Christian Church. Think of such parables 
as the hid treasure, the pearl of great price, the laborers in 
the vineyard, the wise and foolish virgins; of the beati- 
tudes on the meek, on them that hunger and thirst after 
righteousness, on the merciful, the pure in heart, the peace- 
makers; of the gracious invitation, ““Come unto Me all 
ye that labor and are heavy laden’; and of the parable of 
the judgment in which righteous and wicked are separated 
inasmuch as they did, or did not, unto one of the least of 
Christ’s brethren. Luke alone can be compared with this 
evangelist, and if our compiler knew such parables as that 
of the Good Samaritan and of the Prodigal Son we can 
hardly understand how he omitted them. But equally 
difficult is it to understand how Luke left out “‘Come unto 
Me all ye that labor,’’ the beatitudes on the pure in heart 
and the peacemakers; and that matchless summary: “I 
was an hungered, and ye gave Me meat: I was thirsty, 
and ye gave Me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took Me 
in: naked, and ye clothed Me: I was sick, and ye visited 
Me: I was in prison, and ye came unto Me.’’ We must 
never forget that Jesus spent the brief years of His public 
work teaching, and that a primary duty of everyone who 
would follow Him is laid down in the saying found only 
in this gospel: ‘“‘Learn of Me.’’ We must measure our 
loyalty to Jesus by the extent to which we keep being 
educated by Him. 

Again, how essential is this portrait of Jesus the Ful- 
filler. Missionaries to a non-Christian folk go not to up- 
root existing faith and principles, but to supply deficien- 
cies. Christ comes to each one of us not to unmake our 
natural selves with all the wealth of our individuality, but 
to make full what is partial and fragmentary. Bruised 
reeds are not to be snapped and thrown aside nor a sput- 
tering lamp put out. Paul and John lay the stress on 
“new creatures,’ ‘‘born again,’ and it is glorious to recall 


ACCORDING TO MATTHEW afl 


that Christ can make over the worst and give fresh starts 
to those whose lives are wrecks. But this evangelist is 
right in stressing Christ the Conserver who rounds out the 
defective. Paul made over is still Paul, and how much 
poorer the Church and the world would be, if any ele- 
ment in his rich personality had been suppressed! Ours 
is an unfinished earth and its men and women are germinal 
selves, “tadpoles of archangels’’ someone called us, em- 
bryonic sons and daughters of the Most High. Many of 
the woes of the world are due to its uncompleted condi- 
tion, and most of our personal difficulties are due to the 
fact that we are mere starts towards children of God, and 
the starts are often irregular with one part of us developed 
out of proportion to the rest. Thank God for this Christ 
who comes not to destroy but to fulfil. 

Again, is there not a place for an ecclesiastical Jesus? 
True, He is opposed by the Jewish Church, and is ahead 
of His own Church and impeded by it in every age. But 
is it correct to present Jesus as an individualist without 
interest in the religious organization? While He drew up 
no constitution nor creed nor ritual, He succeeded in build- 
ing about Himself a company of disciples with the rock- 
like fidelity of Peter. If He had not, what would have 
remained of His work? In every generation it is the 
group who identify themselves with Him as outspokenly | 
as Peter, and accept the responsibility for His cause, with 
whom He Himself abides and through whom He works. 
This portrait is a perennial reminder, when we become 
disgusted with existing churches and their leaders, of the 
true Church within the official Church, and of the neces- 
sity of maintaining the organized Church that through it 
the spiritual Church may live and do its work. 

Finally, this portrait of the kingly Jesus, “‘Son of Da- 
vid’ and ‘‘Son of the living God,’ makes obedience the 


main test of Christian discipleship: ‘‘teaching them to ob- 


serve all things whatsoever I commanded you.” ‘The 


Di, PORTRAITS OF JESUS CHRIST 


chief indictment of the leaders of the Jewish Church runs:; 
“They say, and do not.’’ Amiel of Geneva once entered 
in his private journal: 


The distinguishing mark of religion is not so 
much liberty as obedience, and its value is measured 
by the sacrifices which it can extract from the indi- 
vidual. 


This evangelist insists on Jesus’ authority. The voice 
from heaven at the Baptism, instead of speaking to Jesus 
Himself as in Mark, speaks to those present: “‘This is My 
beloved Son.”’ “Then follows the teaching on the mount, 
a Christian Sinai, where a greater than Moses utters the 
will of God. What that will means both for Jesus and 
His followers is made plain in Gethsemane, where we hear 
the words ““Thy will be done,”’ and at Golgotha. And 
the last message from the Figure in this portrait is a com- 
mand: ‘“'Go ye, make disciples: and lo, IJ am with you 
always.’ ‘To be a Christian “‘according to Matthew”’ is 
to learn of Jesus and obey Him in spreading His king- 
dom, expecting and bravely sharing His cross, and finding 
Him an abiding presence. 


CHARTERIS: 


THE PORTRAIT IN THE GOSPEL ACCORDING 
TROMELOI GS. 


In architecture, in sculpture and in literature, the nation 
which has made the richest contribution to mankind is 
Greece, and the most beautiful of the portraits of our Lord 
in the New Testament is by a Greek physician, Luke. At 
its outset is the story of the Birth in a manger announced 
by angels to shepherds; at its close the Walk to Emmaus 
with Cleopas and another whose hearts burn within them; 
at its center are the parables of the Good Samaritan and 
the Prodigal Son—the sublimest pictures Jesus ever 
sketched. | 

The artist tells us that he composed his portrait out of 
materials found in ‘‘many’’ sources. We can recognize 
two of them—Mark, three-fourths of whose gospel 1s 
here, and the Collection of Jesus’ Sayings usually ascribed 
to the Apostle Matthew. Besides these Luke had a price- 
less narrative of Sayings and Doings, with an account of 
the Death and Resurrection, and still another writing 
from which he translates his version of the childhood of 
both John the Baptist and Jesus. He is a skilful writer, 
translating prose and poetry with charm, and rendering 
dramatic scenes with moving power. 

He has some peculiarities. He materializes: the Spirit 
at the Baptism descends ‘‘in a bodily form as a dove’’ and 
the risen Jesus speaks of His ‘‘flesh and bones.’ He adds 
explanations: at the Transfiguration he tells us that the 
topic of Jesus’ conversation with Moses and Elijah was 


53 


54 PORTRAITS OF JESUS CHRIST 


His ‘‘exodus’’ to be accomplished at the capital, and he 
says that Jesus spoke the Parable of the Pounds “‘because 
He was nigh to Jerusalem, and because they supposed that 
the kingdom of God was immediately to appear.’’ He 
idealizes the apostles, excusing the three who slept in Geth- 
semane as sleeping ‘‘for sorrow,’ and omitting or toning 
down Jesus’ rebukes. He leaves out the remark to Peter: 
“Get thee behind Me, Satan.’’ In the storm, according 
to Mark, He asked the disciples “‘Have ye not yet faith?” 
Luke makes Him say, ‘“‘Where is your faith?’’ He is fond 
of setting on his canvas contrasting characters—the Phari- 
see and the Publican, Dives and Lazarus, the Prodigal and 
the Elder Brother, in Jesus’ parables, and Mary and Mar- 
tha, the penitent and impenitent robbers, in his own de- 
scriptions. 

Luke tells us that he drew this portrait for an influen- 
tial Gentile, Theophilus, so we are not surprised that he 
leaves out Aramaic words or gives their Greek equivalents 
—"‘lawyer’’ for ‘“‘scribe,’’ ‘“‘master’’ for “‘Rabbi,’’ ““The 
Skull” (Calvary) for Golgotha, Simon the zealot instead 
of Simon the Cananean. Much of the Old Testament 
background with its references to ‘‘them of old time,’ so 
prominent in the first gospel, disappears. Disputes about 
things clean and unclean are omitted, and the harsh denun- 
ciations of the leaders of the Jewish Church are curtailed 
and given a different setting. Jesus talks with Pharisees 
at their own dinner-tables, where He is their Guest, and 
tactfully turns the conversation to expose their faults. 
The brusque Hebrew prophet becomes an urbane Greek. 
Luke dwells on Jesus’ tenderness—His tears over Jerusa- 
lem and His prayer for those who put Him to death. 

He sets Jesus’ Figure before us as the Saviour of sinners. 
‘The angel announces: ‘There is born to you a Saviour.” 
In Luke only have we the story of Zacchaeus with the 
saying: ‘“The Son of man is come to seek and to save that 
which was lost.’’ In Matthew there is the Parable of the 


ACCORDING TO LUKE 55 


Lost Sheep, but Luke adds to it The Lost Coin and the 
Lost Son in the far country. Other evangelists picture 
Jesus anointed by a devoted woman, but Luke tells of “a 
woman who was in the city a sinner,”” who bathed His 
feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. He 
alone records the prayer of the publican: “‘God be merci- 
ful to me, a sinner,’’ and the plea of the dying thief: 
“Jesus, remember me when Thou comest in Thy king- 
dom,” with the heartening reply: ‘“‘Verily I say unto thee, 
To-day shalt thou be with Me in paradise.’’ A favorite 
word of Luke’s great companion, the apostle Paul, 1s 
“‘srace’’—a word which meant originally charm, and never 
wholly lost that sense when it took on the deeper meaning 
of God’s favor to the unlovely. Luke uses it eight times. 
He makes Jesus ask it in His disciples: “‘If ye do good to 
them that do good to you, what grace have ye?” and 
while Mark and Matthew stress the authority with which 
Jesus spoke, in Luke His hearers also ‘‘wondered at the 
gracious words which proceeded out of His mouth.”’ In 
Matthew Jesus bids us ‘‘Be perfect, as the Father in heaven 
is perfect’; in Luke we hear Him say: “Be ye merciful, 
even as your Father is merciful.’’ This portrait sets forth 
Jesus as like the Father “‘kind to the unthankful and the 
evil.” 

Again, Luke presents Jesus as interested in Samaritans 
—the peculiarly disliked neighbors of the Jews. He omits 
the instruction to the disciples: ‘‘Enter not into any city 
of the Samaritans.’”’ He alone tells us that Jesus rebuked 
two of them for wishing to call down fire from heaven 
on a Samaritan village—the more striking because he tries 
to place the apostles in the best possible light and mint- 
mize Jesus’ disagreements with them. He alone records 
the cleansing of ten lepers of whom the only grateful one 
was a Samaritan. He alone gives us the supreme parable 
of neighborliness, whose hero is a member of this despised 
folk, And in the Acts he makes Jesus say in His Great 


56 PORTRAITS OF JESUS CHRIST 


Commission, “‘Ye shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem 
and in all Judea and Samaria.’’ 

Again he paints Jesus as the Friend of the poor. The 
first gospel presents a kingly Child, the Feir of David, to 
whom gifts are brought by Wise Men from afar. In 
Luke we have the Babe in a manger, shut out of the inn, 
and visited only by shepherds. In Jesus’ opening sermon 
Luke puts on His lips the quotation “‘to preach good tid- 
ings to the poor.’’ In Matthew a beatitude is pronounced 
on “the poor in spirit;’’ but Luke hears Jesus say: 
‘Blessed are ye poor; Woe unto you that are rich!’”” He 
alone reports Jesus’ counsel to those who entertain not to 
invite “‘rich neighbors,’ but ‘‘the poor, the maimed, the 
lame, the blind.’’ In Matthew’s version of the Parable 
of the Great Supper, the servants are told to go to the 
highways and ‘‘bid as many as ye shall find to the mar- 
riage feast’; in Luke’s version, the servant is told to 
“bring in the poor and maimed and lame.’”’ He alone re- 
ports the story of the rich man and Lazarus, where Laza- 
rus is apparently taken to heaven merely because on earth 
he was a beggar; and the story of the rich fool, whose soul 
was required of him and his possessions perforce left to 
others. If Theophilus was wealthy, Luke may have 
wished to warn him of his perils, and this physician has 
a peculiar tenderness for the victims of poverty, and makes 
Jesus use His harshest epithets for the unfeeling rich. 

Again, Luke surrounds the Figure of Jesus with figures 
of women—another inferior group in that age. On his 
first pages are Mary and Elizabeth and Anna. He alone 
gives us the scene in the home of Mary and Martha, the 
raising of the son of the widow of Nain with its exqui- 
site touch, “‘He gave him to his mother,”’ the healing of 
the woman bound eighteen years, and the ministry of 
Mary Magdalene, Joanna the wife of Herod’s steward, 
Susanna and other women, who supplied Jesus’ wants. 
Amid uncomplimentary references to wealth, these women 


ACCORDING TO LUKE 57 


are praised for using theirs well. In the account of the 
procession to Calvary, he inserts the incident of the women 
who followed Jesus and His saying: “‘Daughters of Jeru- 
salem, weep not for Me; but weep for yourselves, and for 
your children.” There is one woman we are surprised 
not to find on his canvas—the Syro-Phoenician mother 
who prevailed on Jesus to make an exception of His rule to 
help only Jews. One would think that Luke would have 
delighted in this instance of going outside the bounds of 
Israel; but he probably shrank from telling Jesus’ appar- 
ent reluctance to help her, and from reporting His word 
about not giving the children’s bread to “‘dogs.’’ ‘This 
Christian physician paints Jesus as particularly concerned 
with those upon whom others looked down—Samaritans,. 
the poor, the subordinated sex. 

Again, this portrait depicts Him as a Man of prayer. 
In addition to the instances which he finds in Mark’s nar- 
rative, he shows us Jesus praying at the Baptism, praying 
at the Transfiguration, praying for His murderers on the 
cross. Before He selects His apostles He is pictured as 
spending a whole night in prayer. And it is when Jesus 
is praying, apparently praying with manifest result, that 
His disciples ask ‘‘Lord, teach us to pray.’’ Luke intro- 
duces one of Jesus’ parables as spoken ‘‘that men ought 
always to pray, and not to faint.’’ He alone gives us the 
stories of the friend at midnight and the judge importuned 
by the widow as examples of the value of persistency, and 
the story of the Pharisee and Publican as an illustration of 
wrong and right attitudes in prayer. In no other gospel is 
so much said of Jesus’ dependence on the Father. And in- 
stead of the tragic cry of ‘‘Forsaken!’’ with which Mark 
and Matthew picture Him dying, Luke records the trust- 
ful assurance: ‘‘Father, into Thy hands I commend My 
spirit.”’ 

Again, this portrait presents Him as the universal 
Christ. Simeon’s thanksgiving over the Babe in the temple 


58 PORTRAITS OF JESUS CHRIST 


hails Him as “‘a Light to lighten the Gentiles.” The quo- 
tation from the prophet with which the work of John 
the Baptist is introduced ends: “‘And all flesh shall see 
the salvation of God.’’ In the sermon in the synagogue 
at Nazareth Jesus is made to refer to the instances where 
Elijah goes to the home of a widow in Sidon and Elisha 
cures Naaman the Syrian. What a contrast this sermon 
in Luke is to the saying Matthew records: “‘I was not sent 
but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel!’’ Painting 
the portrait for non-Jews Luke gives dates they would 
recognize: Quirinius is governor in the reign of Augustus 
Caesar when Jesus is born, and Tiberius Caesar and vari- 
ous subordinate rulers are in authority when the ministry 
begins. Luke carries back the genealogy beyond Abraham 
to Adam. He wishes men to see in Jesus, not only the 
Heir of Israel’s patriarchs and kings, but the representa- 
tive Man, the Redeemer for a whole world. 

Luke’s is a happy portrait. It commences with hymns 
over Jesus’ birth. The angel brings ‘‘good tidings of 
great joy’ to all the people. Jesus announces a program 
of emancipation and health—‘‘the acceptable year of the 
Lord.” His disciples return from their mission with joy. 
He sees ‘‘Satan fallen as lightning,’ and “‘He rejoiced in 
the Holy Spirit.’’ He speaks to His followers with en- 
couraging confidence: ‘“‘Fear not, little flock, for it is your 
Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.’ ‘The 
gospel closes: ‘‘And they worshipped Him and returned 
to Jerusalem with great joy: and were continually in the 
temple, blessing God.’’ With all His tenderness and tears, 
the Jesus of Luke’s picture is a jubilant Figure. 

The portrait lacks some of the human touches which 
Mark has preserved. Luke explains Jesus’ failure to work 
wonders in Nazareth, not by saying that He could not, 
but that He thought it unwise to try in His own country. 
He omits an uncomplimentary remark, such as “‘He is be- 
side Himself,’’ and does not mention the successive steps 


ACCORDING TO LUKE 59 


in a cure which bring out the pains and efforts it cost 
Jesus. Instead of the struggle in Gethsemane with its 
three prayers, we have a single prayer, and the account is _ 
so much less tragic that a later hand has inserted in most 
manuscripts the verse recording an agony and bloody 
sweat. But Luke alone speaks of Jesus’ growth as a nor- 
mal Child, and dwells on His repeated recourse to God. 
His mighty works are not His own: ‘‘The power of the 
Lord was with Him to heal.’’ No other gospel makes so 
much of Jesus’ sociability, eating and drinking both with 
foes and friends. Luke’s is a thoroughly human portrait. 

And Luke presents Him as Divine. The Babe born to 
Mary is ‘Christ the Lord.’’ And there are three hints of 
the source of His Divine nature. At the Baptism the 
Spirit rests upon Him, and a Voice from heaven tells 
Him: ‘‘Thou art My Son: this day have I begotten 
Thee.’ That is the text of the best manuscripts, and 
that is probably the explanation of Jesus’ Divinity in one 
of the earlier gospels which Luke was weaving into his 
narrative. Then in the genealogy stands the mysterious 
allusion to ‘‘Adam, the son of God,’ as though humanity 
were the Child of the Father, and Jesus is Divine because 
He is fully man. Then the account of His birth speaks 
of Mary as overshadowed by the power of the Most High 
so that her Son is holy. The wonder of Jesus beggars 
the ingenuity of those who portray Him to explain Him. 
There is no suggestion here of a pre-existence in heaven 
and a coming to earth, but by His ancestry, by His birth, 
by His baptism, Jesus is the Son of God. 

How incalculably poorer we should be without this 
winsome portrait! We called the Gospel according to 
Matthew the most important book ever written because 
it tells us most about Jesus and is oftenest read, but the 
dozen and more parables given in Luke alone, and some 
of these the most moving Jesus ever spoke, the story of 
the Babe of Bethlehem and the Boy in the temple, several 


60 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


incidents in Jesus’ life and passion and resurrection ap- 
pearances, bring this book a close second, and with many 
it is the preferred portrait of our Lord. The poet Cow- 
per tells us in one of his letters: 


I have been intimate with a man of fine taste who 
has confessed to me that, though he could not sub- 
scribe to the truth of Christianity itself, yet he never 
could read St. Luke’s account of our Saviour’s ap- 
pearance to the two disciples going to Emmaus with- 
out being wonderfully affected by it; and he thought 
that if the stamp of divinity was anywhere to be 
found in Scripture, it was strongly marked and vis- 
ibly impressed upon that passage. 


Many of us would say that Jesus was never more irresist- 
ible than in such stories as the Good Samaritan and the 
Prodigal Son. Luke has caught and portrayed superla- 
tively His fascination. 


For Oh! the Master is so fair, 
His smile so sweet to banished men, 
That they who meet Him unaware 
Can never turn to earth again. 


And this is the portrait which lays hold of “‘banished 
men.’’ Not many years ago there appeared a little book 
from the pen of one of our most experienced and devoted 
workers in Japan. It told of a desperate character, a con- 
demned murderer, in a prison, who was visited by two 
women missionaries, who found him unresponsive but 
left with him a copy of the New Testament. One day, 
bored with nothing to do, he opened it, evidently at 
Luke’s gospel, and what happened he told in a series of 
letters which were found after his execution. He had be- 
gun with the Parable of the Lost Sheep—perhaps the good 
women had put a marker there at the Fifteenth Chapter 
—and it caught him. 


a re ee ne 


ACCORDING TO LUKE Gr 


Still, .[he writes] I was not sufficiently impressed 
to have any special belief in what I was reading. I 
simply thought they were words which any preacher 
might have used. I put the New Testament on the 
shelf again and did not read it for some time. A 
little later, when I was tired of doing nothing, I 
took down the book again and began to read. This 
time I saw how Jesus was handed over to Pilate, 
was tried unjustly, and put to death by crucifixion. 
As I read this I began to think. This person they 
called Jesus was evidently a man who at any rate 
tried to lead others into the paths of virtue, and it 
seemed an inhuman thing to crucify Him, simply 
because He had different religious opinions from 
others. Even I, hardened criminal that I was, 
thought it a shame that His enemies should have 
treated Him in this way. 

J went on, and my attention was next taken by 
these words: ‘“‘And Jesus said, Father, forgive them, 
for they know not what they do.’ I stopped. I 
was stabbed to the heart as if pierced by a five-inch 
nail. What did the verse reveal to me? Shall I call 
it the love of the heart of Christ? Shall I call it His 
compassion? I do not know what to call it. I only 
know that with an unspeakably grateful heart, I be- 
lieved. “Through this simple sentence I was led into 
the whole of Christianity. 


Can any of us, with our years of Christian training, do 
much better than this Japanese murderer in his solitary 
cell—-can we find a better phrase for the disclosure afforded 
by this portrait? ‘The love of the heart of Christ;’’ 
“His compassion’’—that is His feeling with others, His 
sympathy. 

Our world is always full of lost folk—entangled like 
Zacchaeus in a maze of circumstances, economic, political, 





62 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


ecclesiastical, social. They are lost, as Luke and Luke's 
Lord knew when He used three stories to describe them— 
lost to guidance like a strayed sheep; lost to usefulness, like 
a coin in the dark and dust under a piece of furniture; lost 
to loving companionship, like a boy in a far country. 
The Son of man is come to seek and to save us from aim- 
less wandering, to put us into circulation, to bring us to 
a Father’s heart and home. This is the gospel—the quin- 
tessence of the message of the life and cross of Jesus. 

A man of letters a century ago, the German Jew, 
Borne, lover of liberty and lover of men, who became a 
Christian because he believed Jesus stood for freedom and 
humanity, called Christianity “the religion of _all_poor 
devils.”’ Luke would agree with him. Samaritans, beg- 
gars like Lazarus, publicans, a bandit being hung, a 
woman of the streets, yes, and Pharisees met in friendly 
talk at dinner-tables—these are the folk with whom he 
surrounds his figure of Jesus. ‘“‘Poor devils’’-—Do you 
and I picture Jesus charmingly to such? ‘‘Poor devils’’— 
There are times when we feel and know ourselves just 
that. Do we also know Luke’s Saviour of sinners? 


CHAPTER VI 
PORURALT AN THE EPISTLE TO THE’ HEBREWS 


In the Letter to the Hebrews the portrait of Jesus is 
placed against a background foreign to our current 
thought, and we must try to understand it. ‘To this 
writer there are two worlds—the present world and ‘‘the 
world to come.’” The latter is not a future world, for it 
already exists. It is the eternal world, and our world is 
its temporary copy. He would answer affirmatively the 
question put by Milton’s angel: 


What if on earth 
Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein 
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought? 


That which interests him in this passing shadow world 
are the objects of the Jewish religion—the law, the taber- 
nacle, the priesthood, the sacrifices. These are earthly 
symbols of permanent heavenly realities. The tabernacle 
was built according to a ‘‘pattern’’ shown to Moses on 
Mt. Sinai; and this pattern was the divine original. He 
divides objects into ‘‘the copies’ and ‘‘the heavenly things 
themselves.’’ For him religion consists in getting beyond 
these shadowy symbols into the world of God’s realities. 
He is painting a picture of Jesus for Jewish converts who 
are in danger of lapsing into their old religion because its 
symbolism fascinates them. He, too, feels the charm of 
the symbols; but Christianity is for him the final and sat- 
isfying faith because in Jesus the heavenly and eternal has 
come to earth, and those who follow Jesus here and now 


63 


64 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


enjoy the solid and lasting fellowship with the living God 
of which the symbols were imperfect hints and foretastes. 


Ye [he says to Christians] are come unto Mount 
Zion, and unto the city of the living God, the heav- 
enly Jerusalem, and to innumerable hosts of angels, 
to the general assembly and church of the firstborn 
who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the Judge 
of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, 
and to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and 
to the blood of sprinkling that speaketh better than 
that of Abel. 


You recall Shelley’s lament for Keats, whom he pic- 
tures awaking from the “‘dream of life,” 


Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly; 
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, 

Stains the white radiance of Eternity, 

Until Death tramples it in fragments.—Die, 

If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek. 


Our writer would say: “Live with Jesus, if thou wouldst 
find the ideals thou desirest thy present possessions.’ 

Against this background of the real and the copy 
worlds, he portrays Jesus: 

First, as the eternal Son of God, belonging to and na- 
tive in the heavenly world. He is the outraying of God’s 
glory and the impress of His essence. Our writer contrasts 
Him with angels, dwellers in God’s presence. Jewish the- 
ology thought of them as brought into being by a word 
whenever God had a mission for them and then ceasing 
to be when their function was done. There is a saying 
that no choir of angels ever sings God’s praises twice. 
They have an exalted but a momentary existence, while 
Jesus from of old has been God’s agent in creating the 
world and will share His throne forever. Then he con- 
trasts this eternal Son with all the mightiest figures in 


IN HEBREWS 65 


Jewish history—with Moses, who led Israel to covenant 
with God, with Aaron and his priestly line who kept that 
covenant open, with Joshua who brought them into a 
promised land, with the prophets who interpreted God's 
will for their time—and shows how Jesus does fully what 
all these achieved in fragmentary and fleeting forms. 

Second, he portrays Him.as a Man, made and tempted 
like ourselves, whom God appoints a unique High Priest 
to offer Himself a sacrifice for sins, and pass into the 
heavens our Forerunner and our continual Intercessor. 
The ancient sacrifices were faint foreshadowings of 
Christ’s Self-sacrifice on the cross; they helped somewhat 
those who used them, but Christ brings His followers into 
perfect intimacy with the Father. 

How remote from our thoughts and interests the back- 
ground and imagery of this portrait are! Has it any value 
for us? Yes, we shall find it most congenial to our minds 
and close to our hearts, if we get past its symbolism—a 
symbolism exactly suited to its first readers—to the in- 
sights of this unknown spiritual genius into Jesus’ life. 

To begin with, none of the evangelists paints more 
vividly the growing human experience of Jesus. Like 
Paul, this writer pictures Him as eternally existent, but 
however he may have conceived the mode of His birth 
(and of that he says nothing), he insists that Jesus began 
His earthly career with no difference from ourselves. He 
was ‘made in all things like unto His brethren.”’ Fur- 
thermore He has from eternity been our Brother, for He 
and we are of one Father, and ‘‘He is not ashamed to call 
us brethren.” He does not become our Brother, at His 
birth in our earth, we have always been His brethren. 
And because we have a ‘“‘flesh and blood”’ existence with 
death to undergo, He shared our human life and death. 
Like us He struggled and grew. He suffered in His trials. 
He was “‘tempted in all points like as we are.’’ He made 
His way through this baffling world, as we must, by faith. 


ee 


66 THE PORTRAITS OF ‘JESUS 
Life was an exploration and a battle for Him. No evan- 


gelist in His description of Gethsemane paints the agony 
of Jesus in accepting the cross with more realism: 


Who, in the days of His flesh, having offered up 
prayers with strong crying and tears unto Him that 
was able to save Him from death, and having been 
heard for His godly fear. 


He selects verbs to convey to us that Jesus was keenly 
alive to, or as we say, savored the experiences through 
which He passed: ‘‘He endured the gainsaying of sin- 
ners’; ‘‘He endured the cross’; “‘He tasted death.”’ And 
for Jesus, as for all of us, this was an education: “He 
learned obedience by the things which He experienced’’— 
the Greek word covers life’s sweet as well as its bitter. 
Our author speaks of Jesus as “‘anointed with the oil of 
gladness above His fellows’’ and also of His strong crying 
and tears. Both were parts of His education. Jesus did 


not start at Bethlehem fully equipped_as the Saviour of 
men. It was in the school of experience tha ae 


qualifications: ‘“‘having been made perfect, He became the 
Author of eternal salvation.” 
No gospel gives us the picture of the years in which 


Jesus developed from Child to Youth, and from Youth 
to Man. Luke supplies us with a single glimpse of the 


Boy at twelve, growing in mind and body. But how we 
wish we had an account of the unfolding of His soul at 


Nazareth! When He comes before us on the pages of the ~ 
evangelists He is mature, and there appears no development — 


in character from the Jordan to Calvary. The picturesque 
summary of three temptations, given in Matthew and 
Luke, seems a piece of autobiography, which Jesus cast 


into parables for His disciples; and He does this after the © 
struggles are over, so that we do not watch Him passing 
through them, and cannot note their effect on Him. We 
} might gain the impression that Jesus was completely fitted 





IN HEBREWS 67 


from birth for His task; that He was cast rather than 
grew. This penetrating writer peers behind the record 
of His life and makes us see the struggles through which 
He goes, and how they disciplined Him for leadership in 
redemption. In bringing His many sons to glory God 
makes the Captain of their salvation “‘perfect through ex- 
periences.”’ .‘‘He tasted’’; ‘‘He learned.” 

And Jesus’ chief acquisition, according to this portrait, 
was sympathy. ‘To be a priest one must be able to ‘‘bear 
gently with the ignorant and erring, for that he himself 
also is compassed with infirmity.’ “I have often ob- 
served,’ writes Mark Rutherford, ‘‘that the greatest help 
Wwe get in time of trouble comes to us from some friend 
who says quite simply, ‘I have endured all that.’’’ This | 
is precisely what our author says of Jesus: ‘‘For in that 
He Himself hath suffered being tempted, He is able to suc- 
cor them that are tempted.’’ He is “‘touched with a feel- 
ing of our infirmities.”’ [he Old Testament at its ten- 
derest speaks of God’s understanding His children: ‘‘He 
knoweth our frame; He remembereth that we are dust.”’ 
“Tn all their affliction He was afflicted.’’ But according to 
this writer there is now in heaven at God’s right hand a 
yet more complete sympathy in One who has Himself 
undergone the whole range of human experience. This 
understanding and compassionate Jesus is “‘the same yes- 
terday, and today, and forever.’’ He pictures Him “‘ever 
living to make intercession for us.”’ 

This last is an idea which may repel us until we think 
it through. If our Father is love, why should we want 
anyone, even Jesus, interceding for us? Well, when we 
pray for one another we do not fancy that we remind a 
forgetful God or tease an unwilling Father to grant a spe- 
cial favor. Prayer is not overcoming God's reluctance, but 
becoming the partners of His helpfulness. So Jesus, with 
His intimate knowledge of human need, shares forever the 
Father’s love and care for His children. In classical myth- 


68 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


= 


ology you recall the story of Theseus, who had to go 
down through a dark labyrinth, sword in hand, to do 
battle with a horrible monster, a man-eating creature with 
the head of a bull and a human body; and how his sister, 
Ariadne, tied a silken thread about his ankle, and told 
him that whenever he felt a pull on that thread he might 
know that she was thinking of him. And Theseus went 
through that terrifying combat, upheld by constant re- 
minders that Ariadne was with him in thought and heart. 
So in this portrait, Jesus, within the veil with God, feels 
with and thinks of His brothers battling with life-devour- 
ing temptations. ‘‘He is able to save unto the uttermost, 
seeing He ever liveth to make intercession.’’ By His sym- 
pathy He remembers and helps us. 

And this brings us to a third aspect of this portrait— 
Jesus is a Man of faith. We are supplied with a defini- 
tion of faith—‘‘the giving substance to things hoped for, 
the testing of things not seen.’’ A long roster of success- 
ful believers follows, whose creative trust gave substance 
to airy hopes and brought them into being. And at the 
climax of the list is Jesus with the significant title, ‘‘the 
Pioneer and Perfecter of faith.’’ He is the boldest Ven- 
turer who has gone farthest in trust, and has opened up 
a new and completely satisfactory life with God for His 
brethren to settle in. 

To this day large numbers of Christians never think of 
Jesus as One who lived by faith. They say, ‘‘He was 
God, therefore He kn@w everything present and future.’ 
But this inspired artist does not so paint Him. How 
could he when he tells us that Jesus “‘learned’’? ‘‘Made 
in all things like us,’’ He did not know the unseen. He 
hoped; and heroically He gave substance to His hopes. 
He lived and died as though the God of His hope were 
actually alive and the world of His hope about to come 
true. And His trust was not misplaced. It seemed so 
when He was enduring the cross and tasting death; but 


IN HEBREWS 69 


“the God of peace’’ brought Him “‘again from the dead.”’ 
And our artist, looking about him a half century or so 
after Easter, saw and portrayed Him surrounded by little 
companies of grateful folk who owed their lives to Him 
and followed His leading. God had ‘“‘heard’’ the strong 
crying and tears; God “‘brought again from the dead the 
great Shepherd of the sheep.” 

And Jesus’ faith is portrayed not only as faith in God, 
but also as faith with God in His human followers. The 
picture of the enthroned Christ, which our artist inherited 
from the earliest preaching at Pentecost, is given in his 
skilful hands an added touch. ‘Jesus, when He had of- 
fered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down on the right 
hand of God, from henceforth expecting until His enemies 
be made the footstool of His feet.”’ John portrays Jesus 
as trusting Peter to feed His lambs and tend His sheep; 
in this portrait He is seated confidently awaiting the com- 
pletion of His work. Henry Drummond said that, next 
to its love for the chief of sinners, the most touching thing 
about the religion of Christ is its amazing trust in the 
least of saints. [his picture was drawn for a company 
of such uncertain Christians that they were on the verge 
of deserting their Lord. But our artist sketches Him as 
serenely assured—‘‘from henceforth expecting.’’ Is not 
Christ’s confidence in us a rallying appeal? 

In one of the hardest fought combats on the moun- 
tainous northern frontier of India a regiment of Scottish 
highlanders, the Gordons, was detailed to charge up a 
precipitous height and capture the enemy’s_ trenches, 
Their commanding officer, as he gave the order to advance, 
called out, ““The Gordons will do it.’’ And they did. 
Jesus staked everything on that one sacrifice of Himself 
and on those who ever after would respond to its appeal. 
He is the Pioneer of creative faith, giving substance to His 
hope, bringing out of sinning humanity an increasing host 
fit to dwell in the city whose builder and maker is God. 


70 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


This portrait has many omissions. Not a single word 
of Christ’s is quoted in the letter from beginning to end, 
nor is there the slightest reference to Him as a Teacher. 
We are not told of anything which Jesus did ‘‘in the days 
of His flesh.’’ We are told what was done to Him—‘‘the 
gainsaying of sinners’’—and how He bore it. The resur- 
rection, of which the earliest preachers and St. Paul made 
so much, is mentioned only once. ‘This writer speaks 
oftenest of His “‘passing into the heavens,’’ as our Fore- 
runner. And for him the supreme interest is Jesus’ death. 


He dwells on the ignominy of it: He “‘suffered without 


the camp’’—an outcast; He “‘endured the cross, despising 
shame.’’ His favorite explanation of it is that of a sacri- 
fice for sin in which Jesus is Himself both priest and vic- 
tim: ‘He offered Himself.’’ 

To many modern readers there is something repugnant 
in a description which seems to place the death of Jesus 
in the same class with the bloody butchery of bulls and 
calves and goats in the Jewish ritual. To them it degrades 
God to represent Him as requiring the blood of His sinless 
Son to cleanse His sinful children. But our author stresses 
the contrast between the killing of helpless animals and 
the voluntary Self-offering of Jesus. To him the new 
and decisive element in the cross was Jesus’ will—His re- 
solve to carry out the purpose of God even to dying. He 
places on Jesus’ lips the words of a psalmist who had pro- 
tested against the ritual of slaughtered beasts: 

In whole burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin Thou 
hadst no pleasure: 


Then said I, Lo I am come 
To do Thy will, O God. 


Our author adds: ‘“‘By which will we have been sanc- 
tified.”’ It is the will of Christ, the will to die if need be 
to help His brethren, which wins us. *‘It is true that He 
insists that “‘without the shedding of blood there is no re- 
mission.’’ And is he not stating a fact of history? With- 


IN HEBREWS ih 


out blood, without extreme cost, has there been any 
cleansing of our world’s life, any deliverance of man from 
ignorance or tyranny or exploitation? Nor does this 
writer picture Jesus as changing God’s attitude towards 
us by His sacrifice: ‘Christ through the eternal Spirit of- 
fered Himself.’ In the Self-offering of Jesus at Calvary 
he sees disclosed the very nature of God. The love which 
leads Jesus to suffer and die on men’s behalf is the Spirit 
of the Eternal Himself, the Spirit of that real world of 
which the holiest things on earth are faint shadows and 
copies. At Golgotha Jesus is the Son of His Father, “the 
effulgence of His glory and the very image of His sub- 
stance.’ 

Along the south shore of Long Island are a series of 
bodies of water, some of which are spring-fed fresh ponds 
although they lie close to the sand dunes beside the beach, 
but others are bays open to the Atlantic, whose salt waters 
ebb and flow in unison with the tides of the great ocean. 
Thus Jesus, pouring out His life in blood, is one in Spirit 
with the God of all, and through His torn flesh our au- 
thor sees a way opened into the world of Reality, a way 
through which God comes to us and we draw near to 
Him. Discard the metaphor, if it does not help you. Is 
it not a fact that in the cross we see the most moving pic- 
ture of God and of the ideal life, and is it not also a fact 
that by that cross our consciences are laid hold on and 
changed and brought into accord with God? 

And there is another dramatic picture of the crucified 
Christ on this canvas. Twice our writer portrays Christ 
suffering again at the hands of Christians who prove dis- 
loyal to Him and forsake Him. ‘““They crucify to them- 
selves the Son of God afresh, and put Him to an open 
shame.” They have “trodden under foot the Son of 
God, and counted: the blood of the covenant, wherewith 
they were sanctified, a common thing.”’ 

Some will recall in Ibsen’s Emperor and Galilean 


f 


f 


| 
hz THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS / 
the dream of Julian the Apostate, in which he fanded 
himself carried to another planet from which he could 
look down on our earth, where he had destroyed the 
Christian faith and uprooted the memory of Jesus so that 
it was ‘‘Galileanless.’’ / 


But behold there came a procession by me on the 
strange earth where I stood. There were soldiers 
and judges and executioners at the head of it and 
weeping women followed. And lo! in the midst of 
the slow-moving array was the Galilean alive and 
bearing a cross on His back. Then I calléd to Him, 
and said, ‘“‘Whither away, Galilean?’’) And He 
turned His face to me and smiled, nodded slowly and 
said, ““To the place of the skull.”’ 


Had not the author of this Epistle to the Hebrews a 
true insight when He portrayed Jesus crucified, not only 
outside the gate of ancient Jerusalem, but also wherever 
Christians are false to His Spirit? During the War a 
British sergeant wrote home that he could not help think- 
ing of Jesus as standing between the lines of trenches out 
in No Man’s Land, and the shells of the contestants tear- 
ing through His body and the jabs of bayonets thrust 
through His quivering flesh. Man’s slaughter of his fel- 
low-men is a new agony for the Spirit of God. And 
what of such Calvaries at this moment—where groups are 
arrayed in economic strife and a vast innocent public suf- 
fers, or where the Spirit of Jesus is openly derided as 
idealistic poppycock in practical affairs, or where the mem- 
bers of one race look down on the members of another as 
lower creatures, or where Christian folk assume that a few 
ardent souls will do the sacrificial work of the Church and 
they can spare themselves from giving that pinches or 
from toil that costs blood, or where a principle akin to 
that eternal Spirit revealed at Golgotha is at stake and we 
who bear Christ’s name are too timid or too dull of con- 


IN HEBREWS 73 


science to go forth to Him outside the camp of the con- 
ventional ‘‘bearing His reproach’’? 

Is there any portrait more moving and heart-searching 
than this of the sympathetic and understanding Jesus, the 
same today as in the yesterday when He was tempted and 
tasted death, His feelings touched by His brethren—ex- 
pecting, and therefore anointed anew with gladness when 
we are faithful—expecting, and therefore crucified afresh 
by our disloyalty? 


CHAPTER VII 
THE PORTRAIT IN THE REVELATION OF JOHN 


The Revelation of John presents us with the most un- 
congenial portrait of Jesus in the New Testament. His 
figure is so shrouded in imagery, and imagery which at 
times impresses us as fantastic and incongruous, that we 
scarcely recognize the Jesus whom we love on the pages 
of the Gospels. 

To appreciate this picture we must remember the state 
of mind of these for whom it was first drawn. ‘They 
were living in a bitterly trying time: 

(1) To the seer on Patmos the churches seemed in a 
parlous condition. In some an earlier enthusiasm and 
consecration had cooled into lukewarmness. In others 
there were scandalous and glaring sins. False teachers 
were sowing corrupting views. All the churches were 
imperilled by persccution. 

(2) The Roman Empire was strangling religion with 
its cult of patriotism, which deified the State in the per- 
son of the reigning Caesar, and demanded that all its peo- 
ple should pay him divine honors. “he Emperor claimed 
the title of Dominus et Deus. Christians were already 
suffering martyrdom for their refusal to accord it. 

(3) And back of the decay of the churches and the 
attacks of the government, the Christians saw a hostile 
world of spirits, Satan and his angels, terrible and hideous 
creatures, of whom the Roman imperialism was one em- 
bodiment—the beast with seven heads and ten horns, 
Behind the tragedy about them in the earth, a drama was 


74 





IN THE REVELATION 75 


developing in the unseen world, where God and His 
Christ battled “‘against the world-rulers of this darkness, 
against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly 
places,’ as Paul had called them. 

To hearten his discouraged and imperilled fellow- 
Christians John paints a portrait of Jesus: 

First, as a majestic Figure, standing in the midst of 
seven golden candlesticks which represent these persecuted 
and wavering churches. Jesus is pictured as the Lamb— 
a name applied to Him twenty-nine times in this book— 
for He has redeemed these churches by His blood. He is 
called “‘the faithful Witness’’—a plea for like loyalty to 
conscience in His followers even to blood. He is termed 
“the Firstborn from the dead’’—to confirm their hope of 
sharing His immortality if they prove faithful unto death. 
He is proclaimed ‘‘the Ruler of the kings of the earth,’ to 
fortify them in resisting the tyranny of the all-powerful 
Caesar. He is painted holding in His right hand seven 
stars—the steadily shining divine ideals for these strug- 
gling churches, burning high in God’s purpose for them 
beyond the winds of earth—and also as ‘“‘walking in the 
midst of the seven golden candlesticks’’—caring for the 
sputtering lights of the earthly churches. And in the mes- 
sage of one of these churches Jesus is pictured in a posture 
\ which has laid hold on Christian thought with moving 
power: 


Behold I stand at the door and knock: if any man 
hear My voice and open the door, I will come in to 
him, and will sup with him, and he with Me. 


That is a loved human glimpse of Jesus on a canvas where 
for the most part He is obscured for us behind the symbols 
with which this seer clothes Him. And it is a heart- 
searching glimpse, for we usually think of the words as 
spoken to those who are not yet followers, while John 
drew this picture of the barred door and the patiently 


76 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


knocking Jesus for the members of a Christian church. 
They were called His and thought of themselves as His, 
but He found Himself shut out of their lives. 

Second, Christ is pictured in heaven, in the presence of 
the throne of God, surrounded by living creatures and 
elders (ancient dwellers on high) and an innumerable 
company of the redeemed. He is described in Old Testa- 
ment metaphors—the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the 
root of David—and also as the slain Lamb, with seven 
horns and seven eyes, that is as complete (seven being the 
number for perfection) in strength and insight. He is 
opening the book of human destiny, and breaking its seals. 
John by this imagery is trying to make fearful Christians 
appreciate that the Lord of history is the loving Saviour 
who redeemed them. The future isin His keeping. And 
John makes them listen to triumphant songs from angels, 
and from every created thing in the earth, and from a 
countless throng out of every nation and tribe and people 
and tongue, ascribing glory to God and the Lamb. But 
as the drama of history is unfolded in a series of visions, 
this victory which Jesus is to win follows a hard fought 
fight. He is pictured as a Warrior, seated upon a white 
horse, with garments sprinkled with blood and followed 
by heavenly armies. 

It is a strange rdle in which to portray Jesus of 
Nazareth, with a sharp sword proceeding out of His 
mouth, ruling the nations with a rod of iron and treading 
the winepress of the fierce wrath of Almighty God. But 
if military metaphors are used to depict Christ as a con- 
queror, His weapons are utterly unlike these of other 
victors. His name is the Word of God; the sword which 
comes out of His mouth is His teaching, and even in His 
wrath He is the Lamb, whose nature is self-sacrifice. The 
militarism is sublimated into reason and love, as in Heber’s 
hymn, ‘“The Son of God goes forth to war.”’ 

Third, Christ is portrayed in the final scene of human 


IN THE REVELATION 77 


history, when God’s holy city descends out of heaven and 
the nations are gathered into it, as the Bridegroom to 
whom this commonwealth is wedded, as the Temple filling 
the whole city with reverence, as the Lamp lighting with 
glorious beauty every part of its life. 

In this portrait the human Jesus is almost completely 
lost. We are reminded of His ancestry from David, of 
His birth of the Jewish race, of His crucifixion near a city 
“which is called spiritually Sodom and Egypt,’”’ and of 
His resurrection. But for the most part He is identified 
with God. Like God He is Alpha and Omega, the First 
and the Last. He shares the throne with Him. He is 
worshipped as God is worshipped. While the whole 
book is a flaming protest against the attempt of Roman 
imperialism to accord divine honors to a man, the reigning 
Caesar, while it throbs with the passionate monotheism 
of the Jew: “Thou shalt have no other gods before 
Me,’’ such has been the impression which Jesus has created 
in redeeming men from sin that His followers cannot help 
setting Him beside God Himself as the Lord of their lives 
and as the Lord of the universe and of all its history. 

These early Christians did not sit down and reason 
out the question: ‘‘Is Jesus human? or is He both human 
and Divine?’’ ‘They had been laid hold on by the mes- 
sage of His cross and triumph; they had given themselves 
to Him as their Saviour; they had tested and proved His 
transforming power in the midst of the soiling life of 
these Asian cities; they knew what He had meant to them 
and theirs. Instinctively they found themselves adoring 
Him, giving Him a trust, a love, an homage, which left 
nothing loftier to offer to God himself. They realized 
that either they were idolators, or that Jesus belonged on 
the throne, King of kings and Lord of lords. Their 
acknowledgement was the spontaneous response to their 
experience of His saving power. He had taken the throne 
of their hearts by His love. Like Isaac Watts, when 


78 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


they surveyed His wondrous cross, and appreciated what 
He had done for them, love so amazing demanded and 
gained their soul, their life, their all. 

It may not be fair to say that Jesus’ humanity is totally 
effaced. There is a suggestive phrase which unconsciously 
connects His human experience with His present Lordship 
of the redeemed: ‘The Lamb which is in the midst of 
the throne shall be their Shepherd.’’ A lamb become a 
shepherd! He who had known the helplessness of life 
in the earth—the need for care and guidance, the assaults 
of foes and the agony of a tortured death—He by His 
experience is fitted to be the Shepherd of a flock now har- 
tied by persecutors, and to be their Shepherd still when 
they have passed through this great tribulation and find 
themselves where they hunger and thirst no more. 

But apart from an occasional touch like this, the Jesus 
of the gospels is scarcely recognizable. Look at the figure 
of One “‘like unto a son of man” in the opening vision: 


His head and His hair were white as white wool, 
white as snow [symbol that He is eternal, like the 
Ancient of days]; and His eyes were as a flame of 
fire [piercing in insight]; and His feet like unto 
burnished brass, as it had been refined in a furnace 
[an image of dazzling brilliancy]; and His voice 
as the voice of many waters; and His countenance 
was as the sun shineth in his strength. 


That Figure may awe us, and like the seer on Patmos we 
may fall at His feet as dead. But the friendly Jesus, 
who wishes not abject slaves but congenial comrades, has 
been obliterated. Had we to choose between the Christ 
on any page of the gospels and this Figure of John’s 
vision, there can be no question of our choice. It is the 
Jesus of history, not the Jesus of devout imagination, who 
holds our hearts. 

But this is not to say that we would lightly part with 


INE REN BICATION 79 


this picture, provided we use it as a supplement to other 
New ‘Testament portraits of our Lord. For it is rich in 
its interpretations of the meaning of Christ to Christians. 

Look at its delineation of Him as the Saviour to whom 
all of us in the churches owe our redemption. ‘Unto 
Him that loveth us’’—one is glad that the correct reading 
is a present not a past tense, ‘‘loveth’’ not “‘loved’’. There 
is nO more poignant and pathetic word than the verb 
“to love’’ in a past tense. ‘‘He loved’’ and stopped loving 
or something ended His power to love? No, He “‘loveth’’ 
through death itself. This frank-spoken seer had un- 
palatable truths to tell these churches, and tells them 
without mincing his words. He does his best to let them 
know what Christ thinks of them. But back of Christ’s 
thought is His heart. He may not think well of us. 
How can He and be honest? He never ceases to love well. 

“Unto Him that loveth us, and loosed us from our 
sins by His blood.’’ Does that mean that Jesus paid 
His blood to God in order to buy forgiveness? John 
speaks of ‘‘the Lamb that hath been slain from the foun- 
dation of the world.’’ Vicarious sacrifice is no after- 
thought in the scheme of things, no contrivance to patch 
up a hopeless situation. It is not a novelty introduced 
by Jesus. It is part of the fabric of the universe, inherent 
in the nature of existence, an obligation which God took 
upon Himself when He risked creating a world. God 
gives Himself for His creatures; He always has and 
always will; even as Jesus gave Himself for many at 
Golgotha. The death of Christ does not change God’s 
attitude towards His children; from the foundation of 
the world God is love. The cross was born in God’s 
mind and comes from God’s heart. It is the supreme 
revelation of the character of Him who is the First and 
the Last. Then why “‘blood’’? Deliverance from evil, 
loosing from sins, costs. God has always known that, 
and met the cost. Jesus shared with the Father the full 


. 80 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


measure of costly sacrifice at Calvary, and “loosed us from 
our sins by His blood”’. 

“And He made us to be a kingdom, to be priests unto 
His God and Father.” We can find all the faults of 
the seven churches of Asia in the churches of today; and 
we are familiar with most of them in ourselves. But 
the fact remains that Christ is dependent upon you and 
me to continue His task. He walks among the flickering 
candles doing His utmost to keep them alight, for apart 
from these churches the world is dark. The iniquities of 
each church are frankly told, but the message to each 
ends with a heartening: ‘‘To him that overcometh will 
I give.’’ This is the portrait for Christians of a confident 
Christ. He is sure that in desperate situations there will 
be overcoming Christians. 

With baffling problems, with engulfing luxury, with 
chilling indifference, all about us, do we not need this un- 
hesitating and assured picture of our Lord? 

Again, look at this interpretation of Jesus and history. 
Clio, the muse of history, is usually portrayed with a very 
sober face. And she may well be. George Gissing makes 
Henry Ryecroft say: “If historic tomes had a voice, it 
would sound as one long moan of anguish’. That is an - 
exaggeration, but what must history have seemed like to 
these small groups of Christians in the face of imperial 
Rome? What did it seem like a few years ago to mothers 
and wives in many lands when suddenly their boys were 
demanded for the battle-lines? What is the key to 
history? How shall we explain these tidal movements 
of races and nations? What is the meaning of human 
life? What is it to end in? ‘Who is worthy to open 
the book, and to loose the seals thereof?” ‘““Worthy’’— 
that is the Jewish contribution. History has a moral 
clue, and it is not cleverness but character that can explain 
and control it. 

After listening to the inaugural lecture of Professor 


IN THE REVELATION 81 


Stubbs in the history chair at Oxford, J. R. Green sat 
down and wrote to his fellow-historian Freeman that 
Stubbs had drawn 


the old simple lesson that the world’s history led 
up to God, that modern history was but the broad- 
ening of His light in Christ. I remember when 
this was my clue to history once—I am afraid I 
have lost it without gaining another. 


At the moment our world is supremely wistful for a 
new spirit. We have gloried, and not without reason, in 
vast scientific advances which have marvellously altered 
the externals of life. But the demand of the hour is for 
inner transformations, for characters adequate to manage 
these hugely augmented forces. And when the wisest 
of our day try to describe what this wished-for spirit 
is, in inter-racial and international relations, in industry, 
in education, they give us something surprisingly reminis- 
cent of a Life lived nineteen centuries ago. 

One of those who represented our country at Versailles 
during the long and difficult discussions which led up to 
the Treaty, told me that in those trying weeks the thought 
often occurred to him: “If only these statesmen would 
approach our questions resolved to be guided by the Spirit 
of Christ, most of our obstacles would speedily vanish’’. 
And as he surveyed the work in retrospect, he could not 
help feeling that the absence of that Spirit was the chief 
cause of the unsatisfactory results. 

In an odd combination of words John hears Jesus 
saying: “I am the root and the offspring of David, the 
bright, the morning star.’’ ‘There in one picture are the 
soil and the skies; a root embedded in the ground of the 
past, a star heralding the morning. Jesus sums up the 
best that has been; He is the flower of a long spiritual 
development. He is also the harbinger of a new era. 
And all this because of His character: ‘‘He is worthy.” 


82 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


And when we look at the climax of this book where 
human society is wedded to Christ, ruled by His spirit 
for He is on the throne, filled with His faith for He is the 
temple, luminous with His love for He is its light, is 
there any worthier goal for human striving? How will 
you read the long story of our world’s evolution, from 
the slime to man, from the most primitive types of men 
up to the most socially-minded and spiritual, with any 
more reasonable interpretation, than that the consum- 
mation is this Christ-ruled society? 

And is not John correct when he makes this consum- 
mation the sequel of a desperate conflict? Is not the 
Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of the slain Lamb, at grips with 
the forces of selfishness? And for every man of us is 
this not the issue which we must decide, and decide again 
and again, on which side we will battle? ‘‘They also 
shall overcome that are with Him, called and chosen and 
faithful.” 

And when we ask ourselves what is the ultimate 
future to which we personally look forward, whether 
we picture the ideal commonwealth in John’s imagery 
of a new Jerusalem or sketch it with other scenery, can 
we put it more convincingly or more alluringly than in 
his simple sentences? 


His servants shall serve Him—lf[a life of useful- 
ness}. And they shall see His face—[a life of 
companionship]. And His name shall be in their 
foreheads—|[a life for men of manifest Christlike 
character. | 


A commonwealth wedded to Christ, inhabited by 
serviceable and friendly Christlike folk—that is the end 
to which the whole creation moves. 

Is it surprising that a book which sets forth this portrait 
of a hoped-for victorious Christ concludes with passionate 


IN THE REVELATION 83 


cries for His speedy triumph? As one would expect of 
this imaginative seer, he pictures it spectacularly: 


Behold, He cometh with the clouds; and every 
eye shall see Him, and they which pierced Him; and 
all the tribes of the earth shall mourn over Him. 
Even so, Amen. 


Granted that this is poetry, not prose, such a dramatic 
scene voices an abiding conviction of Christian minds 
that sooner or later our faith will be publicly vindicated. 
Nor is this an airy hope ungrounded in experience. In 
our own day have we not seen an advent in judgment, 
when those who trusted in brute force and scouted the 
principles of the Lamb have been shown up as incapable of 
giving us a world fit to live in? Passage after passage in 
this highly imaginative book has seemed to describe some 
aspect of the lurid happenings which befell our generation. 
And a great wistfulness has come upon us to have sight 
of that Christ-ruled society to which this portrait keys our 
hope. The longing cries with which the book closes find 
an echo in our desires: “‘And the Spirit and the bride 
say ‘Come.’’’ A Church eagerly expecting Christ’s 
entrance into and control of His world infects those who 
listen to her message with a like yearning: ‘‘And he 
that heareth, let him say, Come’. And from within the 
heavenly world, where the holy city waits, this seer hears 
Christ with equal eagerness, saying: ‘Behold, I come 
quickly’’. 

One may say cynically that this was John’s fancy, a 
delusion evidenced by the long intervening centuries. 

So trust the men whose hope for the world 
Is ever that the world is near its end: 


Impatient of the stars that keep their course 
And make no pathway for the coming Judge. 


Or one may say that “‘quickly’’ has little to do with our 
measures of time. John was right in thinking Christ as 


84 THES POR TRAIES OP eEsus 


eager, yes, more eager than the best of men, to see the 
Divine purpose come to pass. And if there are laws of 
spiritual advance which he did not interpret as clearly as 
did Jesus in His parables, is it not also possible that you 
and I delay the advent of the heavenly city by our lack 
of confident and indomitable hope? Do we not need to 
have on our lips an expectant prayer, like John Milton’s, 
when he was a secretary to the government of Puritan 
Britain: 


Come forth out of Thy royal chamber, O Prince 
of all the kings of the earth; put on the visible robes 
of Thine imperial majesty; take up that unlimited 
sceptre which Thine Almighty Father hath be- 
queathed to Thee; for now the voice of Thy bride 
calls Thee; and all creatures sigh to be renewed? 


Yes, does not this portrait of One worthy by His re- 
demptive love to unlock the destiny of our world and 
bring in the waiting ideals of God awaken in us this 
seer’s resolve to open life wherever we touch it for His 
admission, answering the wistfulness of an eager Christ 
with our cordial response: ‘‘Even so, Come, Lord 
Jesus’’? 


CHAPTER | VIII 


THE PORTRAIT IN THE GOSPEL ACCORDING 
TO JOHN 


It is generally thought that this portrait of Jesus was 
drawn in the region about Ephesus at the close of the 
First Century. It was drawn for men who already knew 
something about Him. Paul had preached in this district 
and had written to it the letters to the Colossians and 
Ephesians, in which he paints Jesus as the glorified Lord 
who dwells spiritually in His followers. By this time, 
too, the Gospel according to Mark with its picture of 
Jesus was known, for our evangelist uses it, and quite 
likely the Gospel according to Luke was circulating in this 
region. The beloved disciple, as this artists’s name is 
signed on this canvas, whether by himself or by some 
student of his (and it would seem less immodest if another 
spoke of him as “‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’’), takes 
Paul’s conception of the spiritual Christ, alive in Christian 
hearts, and selecting from Mark and Luke and from other 
traditions, sayings and doings of Jesus, His Self-sacrifice 
on the cross and His resurrection, gives an interpretation 
of them in the light of his own mature religious experience. 

This is not another biography of the Jesus who had 
lived and taught and died in Palestine. “There was no 
need of duplicating what his public already possessed. 
This is a devotional meditation on Christ in the spiritual 
experience of the beloved disciple to bring men to believe 
in Him as the Son of God and to have life “‘in His name.”’ 
John is not looking back, but looking in. He is not 


85 


86 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


thinking so much of what Jesus did, as of what He does: 
not so much of what He said as of what He is saying; not 
so much of what Jesus was in Galilee and Judza as of 
what He is in the lives of believers in Ephesus. Browning 
makes our evangelist say: 


To me that story—ay, that Life and Death 
Of which I wrote ‘it was’’—to me, it is: 
—Is, here and now. 


The places which he mentions—the pools of Bethesda and 
of Siloam, Aenon near to Salim, the Upper Room in 
Jerusalem, are located in the soul as well as on the map; 
they belong not only to geography but to spiritual 
biography. | 

To interpret Jesus to folk in Asia Minor in his day our 
evangelist uses current ideas. One is that of the Reason 
or Word of God, through which the earth was created an 
orderly world. People talked about the Logos then, as 
they talk about Evolution today. John asks: ‘Would 
you know the Reason and Word of God by which worlds 
are made? ‘That Word became flesh in Jesus. Let me 
tell you what He says to, and does for, and is in, those 
who obey Him.” Symbolism was popular with thinkers 
in that age. Our artist uses it constantly. Siloam is ‘‘by 
interpretation Sent,’ so the pool becomes a picture of 
the Godsent Christ. From the side of the Crucified flow 
water and blood—symbolized in the Christian sacraments 
of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Every miracle is 
recorded to introduce its symbolic meaning: water turned 
to wine—Christ’s transformation of the common to the 
festive; multitudes fed with loaves and fishes—Christ the 
Bread of life; a man born blind given sight—Christ the 
Light of the world; Lazarus long dead raised again— 
Christ the resurrection and the life. He sees in miracles 
‘‘acted parables.’’ Nor is this true only of a few events 
in Jesus’ history: His entire career from birth through 


ACCORDING TO JOHN 87 


death is a symbol of God’s eternal life, so that he who has 
seen Jesus has seen the Father. 

Obviously this is not another portrait of the historic 
Jesus to be classed with those in our first three gospels. 
In the conversation with Nicodemus Jesus is made to speak 
of Himself as ‘‘the Son of man which is in heaven.” It 
is history, but the history of Jesus in the mind and heart 
of the beloved disciple. “To be sure there are historical 
details in which this portrait supplements and even 
corrects the earlier pictures. Mark mentions but one 
journey to Jerusalem, while John speaks of several; but 
Mark reports Jesus as saying “‘O Jerusalem, how often 
would I have gathered thy children together,’’ and makes 
Him intimate with persons there, like the man from whom 
the ass is borrowed for the public entry and the goodman 
of the house where He plans to keep the passover. Ac- 
cording to the earlier gospels the length of Jesus’ ministry 
was a single year; but John makes it cover nearly three 
years. According to the other evangelists the Lord’s 
Supper was part of the paschal meal; according to John 
the crucifixion occurred on the day when the paschal lamb 
was slain. And in these respects most scholars think him 
more accurate. But historic detail is not his main interest. 
He is a theologian rather than an historian. While Mark 
begins his narrative of Jesus at the Jordan, and Matthew 
and Luke with genealogies and a birth in Bethlehem, John 
begins in eternity: ‘‘In the beginning was the Word, 
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, 
and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”’ 

Nor does he report the exact words of Jesus or of his 
other characters. On these pages John the Baptist, Jesus, 
the disciples, the evangelist himself, all have the same mode 
of thought and the same style of speech. We cannot tell 
in any conversation, like that with Nicodemus or the 
Samaritan woman, where Jesus stops and where the 
evangelist begins. He is giving us the sense rather than 


88 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


the words, and is interpreting the meaning for his readers. 
No doubt many of his picturesque metaphors—the good 
shepherd, the vine, the corn of wheat, the bread, the living 
water, the Father’s house, came from Jesus Himself; but 
John does not transcribe a single one of His parables. He 
makes Jesus say: ‘The hour cometh when I shall 
no more speak unto you in parables, but shall tell you 
plainly of the Father.’ He is making Jesus’ meaning 
plain to his readers. What he gives us is not the saying 
as it came to him, but as it has lain in his mind for years 
with all its gathered significance. He believes in a Christ 
who had “‘yet many things to say’’ and had promised that 
His indwelling Spirit would lead His followers into truth. 
The conversations which he records are those of Christ 
speaking “‘in the Spirit’’ and unfolding His meaning to 
men in other circumstances and in another age from those 
to whom He first spoke in Galilee and Jerusalem. 

The Jesus portrayed in the earliest preaching is “‘hid’’ 
in the heavens into which He has been received until a 
dramatic return from the clouds. ‘The first disciples had 
expected this to occur very soon. Paul had written: 
“We that are alive, that are left unto the coming of the 
Lord,’’ evidently anticipating the advent in his life-time. 
The beloved disciple believes that Paul was right; but 
instead of making Jesus speak of a spectacular return on 
the clouds, he interprets Him as coming spiritually to 
abide in His followers’ hearts: “I will not leave you 
orphans: I come unto you. Yet a little while and the 
world beholdeth Me no more; but ye behold Me because 
I live, and ye shall live also.’ And who will say that 
the beloved disciple did not give us a true interpretation, 
one that is thoroughly in harmony with the mind of Jesus, 
in this matter, although he does not give either the exact 
picture or the precise words which Jesus used? 

The most striking difference between the Jesus who 
speaks to us in this portrait and the Jesus who teaches us 


ACCORDING TO JOHN 89 


from the other gospels, is that in them He speaks usually 
of the kingdom, while in this He speaks of Himself. In 
John alone occur all the saying which begin with “I am.” 
This is not to say that the beloved disciple is introducing 
a new emphasis upon Jesus Himself. In Mark, Jesus asks 
“Who say ye that I am?” and in Matthew we have the 
invitation, ‘‘Come unto Me, and I will give you.’’ But 
John’s experience, influenced by the experience of Paul, 
has made Jesus Himself central in the Christian life. 
Jesus’ words are spirit and life to those who obey them. 
but the main point is to focus one’s thought and trust on 
Jesus Himself: I am the living Bread, the Light of the 
world, the Door, the Good Shepherd, the Resurrection 
and the Life, the Way and the Truth, the Vine. Some- 
times the words “I am” occur just by themselves: ‘“‘If 
ye do not believe that I am, ye shall die in your sins.” 
“When ye have lifted up the Son of Man, then shall ye 
know that I am.’’ The meaning is plain: ‘I am the 
decisive personality.’ As we read the discussions of Jesus 
with ‘“‘the Jews” (as this evangelist called His opponents) 
—a strange title to give those who were with Him in the 
flesh, for He a Jew of the Jews rarely spoke with any of 
another race—His words sound harsh and sharp. If we 
think of ‘‘the Jews’’ as the Jewish antagonists of Chris- 
tianity a generation later, and if we think of Christ's 
insistence upon acceptance of Himself as a result of this 
beloved disciple’s mature experience, we understand the 
situation far better. Indeed, we know in our own ex- 
perience the fatal consequences of disputing with Christ 
and turning our backs upon Him. And we also know 
that the beloved disciple is stating sober fact when he 
makes Jesus say: ‘‘If any man thirst, let him come unto 
Me and drink,’’ and adds the comment, ‘‘He that believeth 
on Me, from within him shall flow rivers of living water. 
But this spake He of the Spirit.”’ 

From the first page to the last this gospel pictures Jesus 


90 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


as the Son of God, the Only-Begotten, witnessed as Divine 
by the Baptist, by the Scriptures, by His works, by His 
words, and by the testimony of the Father. He omits 
from the portrait altogether those scenes in which Jesus 
appears most a Man dependent upon Divine help: the 
Baptism, the Temptation, the Transfiguration, Geth- 
semane. At its climax Thomas addresses Him: “My 
Lord and my God.” But no evangelist takes more pains 
to emphasize Jesus’ humanity. John’s readers were of 
two classes: Christians who believed in His divinity and 
were in danger of not thinking Jesus a true Man, and 
non-Christians for whom He was nothing but an im- 
postor. For these Christians John insists the Word was 
made “‘flesh,”’ that Jesus prayed, that He actually died and 
was buried. The heresy of that age was that a Spirit had 
shown Himself in Jesus, but had ascended back to heaven 
before the crucifixion. John alone records that Jesus was 
wearied on a journey, wept at a friend’s grave, and in 
the agony of death cried ‘‘I thirst.’’ But even so, in this 
portrait heavenly splendor constantly flashes upon the 
earthly scene: “This beginning of His signs did Jesus 
in Cana of Galilee, and manifested His glory.” ‘“‘Jesus, 
knowing that the Father had given all things into His 
hands, and that He came forth from God and goeth into 
God” rises from supper and washes His disciples’ feet. 
The beloved disciple is telling us how Jesus’ acts appear to 
him—He is in the flesh, but we behold His glory. And 
our evangelist would have his readers see it and believe. 

It is plain that we should not turn first to this gospel 
when we wish to know what Jesus did and said. We 
turn first to the three other evangelists. But here is a 
pioneering thinker who dares to take Jesus out of the past 
because he is sure that He belongs to the ages, to discard 
the forms of Jesus’ thought and speech which obscure Him 
from the men of a later day, to use the experience of a 
great Christian like Paul and his own experience to inter- 


ACCORDING TO JOHN 9] 


pret Jesus, and who sets Him in the midst of a new gener- 
ation that they may see and hear Him as their 
contemporary. And John did his task so skilfully that 
subsequent centuries have not felt that he altered Jesus 
in his portrait. They place this picture side by side with 
the other three, as a correct likeness of their Master. It 
may seem difficult to think that He who certainly said: 
“I was not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of 
Israel’’ actually meant: ‘‘I am the Light of the world,” 
yet not only Christians but Jews acknowledge that this 
iS so. 

From the Zionist colony in Jerusalem, a most learned 
scholar, Dr. Joseph Klausner, has written in modern 
Hebrew for his fellow-Jews a biography of Jesus, in 
which, after exalting Jesus as an ethical teacher un- 
paralleled in “‘sublimity, distinctiveness and originality,”’ 
and an artist in parables, he concludes that Judaism was 
right in rejecting Him because His teaching is too inclusive 
and too ideal to be the basis for Jewish nationalism. 

John correctly understands Jesus’ meaning when he 
writes: ‘“‘God so loved the world that He gave His only 
begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not 
perish.”’ 

And what a service John rendered when he drew the 
portrait of Jesus against the background of the thinking 
of his readers’ time, instead of in the setting of Jesus’ own 
day! It may well be that Jesus Himself never heard of 
the Logos or Word. That was an idea current among 
philosophers in Alexandria. It is almost certain that He 
never thought of anything symbolical in the pool of 
Siloam. But John saw that the only essential thing was 
the Spirit of Jesus—the Spirit of His teaching, His works, 
His cross; and that Spirit he has made persuasively plain in 
this portrait. Jesus belongs not to the First Century, but 
to all time. Each generation must form its own picture 
of Him—not a different Jesus from the Man of Nazareth, 


92 SUE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


but the same Jesus alive in and speaking to the men of 
our day. 

And John supplied an essential need when he drew this 
portrait in which Jesus speaks of our personal relations to 
Him. We would not forego one of His parables of the 
kingdom of God; but the disciples who first listened to 
them had Jesus with them and understood what He said 
in the light of what He did and was. ‘The stories of the 
Mustard Seed and of the Leaven, or even those of the 
Good Samaritan and of the Prodigal Son, would not move 
us as they do, if we detached them from Jesus Himself. 
It is because we think of Him as speaking them, and as 
illustrating them, the very embodiment of His message-—— 
Himself the Good Samaritan who rescues helpless human- 
ity and Himself an Elder Brother who goes into the far 
country to bring back at the cost of His blood the straying 
son of the Father—that they capture our hearts. The 
beloved disciple sets us face to face with Jesus Himself, 
and makes Him say to us, “I am the Door, the Good 
Shepherd, the Vine. Abide in Me, and lin you.” And 
when we wish this personal intercourse with Jesus we 
instinctively turn to this Gospel, and especially to the 
words spoken in the Upper Room, and find Jesus opening 
His inmost heart to us, and claiming us as His friends. 

And John has shown sublime skill—inspired skill—in 
phrasing the message of Jesus. Could we pay a higher 
tribute than this when we say that we cannot tell what 
are Jesus’ own words and what are those of His beloved 
disciple? Listen to a few of them: 


God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must 
worship in spirit and in truth. 

Except a man be born anew, he cannot see the 
kingdom of God. 

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make 
you free. 


ACCORDING TO JOHN 93 


I came that they may have life, and may have 
it abundantly. 

My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and 
they follow Me, and I give unto them eternal life, 
and they shall never perish. 

I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all 
men unto Myself. 

In My Father’s house are many mansions. If it 
were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare 
a place for you. 


In these words we hear the authentic voice of Jesus Him- 
self—the Jesus whom we trust and love and (to some 
degree) know in our own experience—but no one can tell 
how many and which of the words were uttered by Jesus 
in the flesh, and which come from His Spirit in the heart 
and mind of this beloved disciple. Had ever a writer a 
more difficult task than this evangelist undertook? And 
was ever any more certainly led of the Spirit and more 
supremely a creative artist, making the Jesus who spoke 
in his soul speak to all subsequent centuries? 


John’s method is not to attempt a proportioned 
biography—a fifth of his material is set in a single scene 
on one evening in the Upper Room—but to present a 
series of pictures in each of which Jesus is the central 
Figure—the Lamb of God to whom the Baptist points his 
disciples; the living Water incomparably better than that 
which the woman seeks at Jacob’s well; the Bread of God 
symbolized in the loaves which satisfy thousands and 
which nourish permanently, unlike the manna Moses gave 
to famishing Israel; the Crucified who lays down His own 
life, bears His own cross to the place of execution, and is 
glorified in dying. Every detail in each scene is so care- 
fully subordinated that we never take our eyes off Christ. 
Our artist does not waste a stroke of his brush on the 
minor characters. Judas not Iscariot, for example, is 


94 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


merely a label for a question—a question which has arisen 
in the minds of those with whom John has talked, and, 
without spending a moment describing this Judas, he 
uses him to bring his readers’ perplexity straight to Jesus. 
‘The Greeks who came to Philip are not described. We 
should like to know where and what they had heard of 
this Prophet in Israel; but to John their plea, ‘‘Sir, we 
would see Jesus,’ is just the inquiry of many wistful 
folk, and like Philip and Andrew he hurries off to Jesus 
Himself and lets Him speak. Every character in his narra- 
tive must, like the Baptist, decrease that Christ may in- 
crease. Indeed not only are details not allowed to detain 
us from Jesus, but they are themselves most cleverly used 
to suggest Him. ‘The pool at Bethesda, so tantalizing to 
that man who had been thirty-eight weary years Waiting 
and with no one to help him in, becomes a contrast to the 
ever accessible and immediately healing Jesus. The 
cynical remark of Caiaphas that “‘it is expedient that one 
man should die for the people,’ at once hints at Jesus’ 
vicarious death and is made a prophecy. In no other 
picture are we as continuously faced with Jesus Himself. 
Like certain portraits, so drawn that from whatever angle 
one views them the face and eyes follow us and look 
straight at us, the Jesus on John’s pages is always dealing 
directly with ourselves. 

And yet, while Jesus Himself dominates every scene, 
this evangelist wishes us to look at Him and listen to Him 
only because through Him we are looking at and listening 
to another. For this beloved disciple Jesus is the Way, 
but he would not have himself or his readers remain for- 
ever en route. ‘Those who stay on the road are just 
tramps. ‘lhe Way leads home and home is the Father’s 
heart. In no other portrait are we so constantly aware 
in and through the Figure before us of an unseen Presence. 


=—— 


ACCORDING TO JOHN 95 


The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He 
seeth the Father doing. | 

My Father giveth you the true Bread out of 
heaven. 

If ye knew Me, ye would know My Father also. 

No one shall snatch them out of My hand. My 
Father is greater than all; and no one is able to 
snatch them out of the Father’s hand. I and the 
Father are one. 

He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father. 

The Father abiding in Me doeth His works. 

I am not alone, because the Father is with Me. 

O righteous Father, the world knew Thee not, but 
I knew Thee; and these knew that Thou didst 
send Me, and I made known unto them Thy name, 
and will make it known. 


And this supreme ‘‘making known’’ takes place when 
Jesus hangs on the cross. He goes to His death praying: 
“Father glorify Thy name.’’ And the pictures of the 
Crucified on these pages—the Lamb of God that taketh 
away the sin of the world, the Son of man lifted up like 
the serpent in the wilderness, the good Shepherd laying 
down His life for the sheep—the pictures are there that 
through them we may look at the Father, whose heart 
toward the world they disclose, whose name at Golgotha 
is ‘glorified’ and ‘“‘made known’’—and that name is Love. 

No portrait more appropriately sums up the ultimate 
meaning of Jesus for Christians. The human Life which 
began at Bethlehem is the unveiling of the life of God. 
We do not prize for its own sake the career of Jesus in the 
years of His flesh—inestimably valuable as are His teach- 
ings and His character and His example; but these have 
their supreme worth for us because what Jesus was, His 
and our Father is from everlasting to everlasting. And 
what Jesus means to us in our present experiences, where 


96 THE PORTRAITS OF JESUS 


He is the Life and Light of our souls, explains for us the 
secret of the universe. He is our clue to the whole scheme 
of things. To be His friends, sharing His sympathies and 
purpose, is to live, to live abundantly, to live eternally. 
In Him is life and the life is the light of men. 


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